No Job for a WomanLaura Shapiro reviews 'A History of the Wife' by marilyn Yalom.
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The Ape and the Sushi Master by Frans de WaalFirst chapter.
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Are You in Anthropodenial?Douglas Foster reviews 'The Ape and the Sushi Master' by Frans de Waal.
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Buff and ReadyHolly Brubach reviews 'Looking Good : Male Body Image in Modern America' by Lynne Luciano.
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Looking Good by Lynne LucianoFirst chapter.
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Killer Woman Blues by Benjamin DemottFirst chapter.
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Even Baboons Get the BluesRob Nixon reviews 'A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons' by Robert M. Sapolsky.
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Understanding It AllEssay Review of C. D. Darlington, 'The Evolution of Man and Society'.
Understanding It All: Essay Review of C. D. Darlington, The Evolution of Man and Society | Home - Robert M. Young | What's New | Search | Feedback | Guestbook | Contact Us | The Writings of Professor Robert M. Young 'Understanding It All: Essay Review of C. D. Darlington, The Evolution of Man and Society' 33k I was delighted to be approached by the New Statesman to review this massive tome. It turned out to be one of the purest examples of scientism I have ever read. Genetics is claimed to explain everything in human history and to justify racist and classist views aplenty. Darlington was an Oxford professor and displayed pure explanatory arrogance. His book ranks with E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology in claiming that biology can account for cultural and historical phenomena. The review appeared in the 26 September 1969 issue. Download View Online The Human Nature Review Ian Pitchford and Robert M. Young - Last updated: 09 March, 2002 07:53 AM | Human Nature | Books and Reviews | The Human Nature Daily Review | Search |
Singer in the RainA review of Peter Singer's book 'A Darwinian Left'.
FT October 2000: Singer in the Rain Featured Article: God on the Internet Jonathan V. Last SUBSCRIBE ROFTERS Discussion groups led by readers of FIRST THINGS RSS Books in Review A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation Copyright (c) 2000 First Things 106 (October 2000): 57-63. Singer in the Rain A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation. By Peter Singer. Yale University Press. 64 pp. $9.95. Reviewed by Nancy Pearcey Back when E. O. Wilson first promoted his newly hatched theory of sociobiology, protesters doused him with a pitcher of water. Since then, sociobiology has come a long way, baby. Dolled up with fancy new monikers like evolutionary psychology, it now saunters boldly into the academy claiming to be not only a valid field of investigation but much morea comprehensive synthesis of biology and philosophy, a guide to ethics and policy. Many scholars are now scrambling for the ladys hand, eager to claim her for their own philosophical programs. Yet evolutionary psychology turns out to be disturbingly fickle, capable of supporting a wide range of ethical conclusions. For even if we grant that certain human behaviors have an evolutionary origin, that does not tell us which behaviors are normative or morally good. In his latest book, A Darwinian Left, Peter Singer joins the line of suitors, hoping to win over evolutionary psychology to his particular liberal agenda. Whether he succeeds is another matter. Sociobiology originally raised hackles, Singer explains in an interview, because it was regarded as a revival of nasty, rightwing biological determinisma revival, that is, of Social Darwinism, which has long harnessed the idea of the survival of the fittest to notions of progress through competition and the ruthless pursuit of selfinterest. In evolutionary psychology, the selfish individual has merely been replaced by the selfish gene. Interestingly, Singer does not deny this unpleasant view of human nature; indeed, he urges the left to face up to its truth. Leftist utopianism is based on the assumption of the malleability of human nature, leading to dreams of the Perfectibility of Man. Nor are these merely idle dreamsthey have inspired attempts to remake society and human nature, issuing in the totalitarian state. But Darwinism implies that human nature is not completely malleable, Singer argues: the left must face the fact that we are evolved animals, and that we bear the evidence of our inheritance, not only in our anatomy and our DNA, but in our behavior too. Thus humans possess evolved dispositionsfor example, to act from selfinterest and to form hierarchical social arrangementsand political thinkers need to take these dispositions into account. Not that Singer thinks leftists should give up their ideal of, say, an egalitarian society; but they should understand that it is not going to be nearly as easy as revolutionaries usually imagine. Yet this dark view of human nature is only half the picture, Singer insists. Recent Darwinians have shown that humans are hardwired by natural selection for cooperative as well as competitive behavior, even for altruism. Singer cites nowfamiliar studies of kin altruism, where apparently sacrificial behavior on the part of a mother for her child is explained as a strategy for passing on her genes. He also describes game theory experiments showing that cooperative strategiestit for tatwork best in getting what we want. Of course, neither of these examples represents altruism in the ordinary sense; they are merely extended forms of selfinterest. Nevertheless, they are enough to satisfy Singer that Darwinism may now be harnessed to support the lefts vision of a more cooperative society. Does Singer ultimately succeed in crafting a Darwinian left? Not exactly. To begin with, for all his eagerness to be identified as a man of the left, Singer shows a cavalier disregard for the concerns of real leftists. Historically, the left focused on the ownership of the means of production; in todays identity politics, the enemy is no longer capitalism but racism, sexism, and homophobia. Yet Singer says nothing about any of these; instead he offers a definition of the left so broad as to be meaningless. [T]he core of the left is a set of values, he writes. A person of the left sees the vast quantity of pain and suffering that exists in the universe and wants to do something to reduce it. Under this expansive definition, everyone who favors social ameliorationincluding, no doubt, everyone reading this reviewis a leftist. Clearly, Singer is just not all that interested in leftist political theory. Neither is he very interested in evolutionary psychology, it turns out. For all his eagerness to woo Darwinism away from the right, he recognizes that evolution cannot provide a basis for the set of values he wants to defend. Earlier sociobiologists like Wilson had hoped that evolution would reveal ethical premises inherent in mans biological nature, challenging the traditional belief that we cannot deduce values from facts. But those earlier hopes have been chastened, and today most proponents of evolutionary psychology vigorously disavow the naturalistic fallacy of seeking to derive ought from is. Evolution carries no moral loading, it just happens, Singer writes. Even an evolved disposition . . . cannot serve as the premise of an argument that tells us, without further ethical input, what we ought to do. Darwinism tells us merely what barriers exist in human nature to enacting a given political agenda, allowing us to better assess costs and benefits; it does not provide a justification for values. And since to be of the left is to hold certain values, Singer writes, Darwins theory has nothing to do with whether one is left or right. So why did he write the book, one wonders. It turns out that the most important function Darwinism performs for Singer is to debunk certain preDarwinian ideas: to wit, the biblical account of human origins and the ethic that goes along with itespecially the idea that humans are unique and ought to be treated differently from nonhumans. That view has been thoroughly refuted by evolution, Singer asserts. By positing an unbroken historical continuum from animals to humans, Darwinian thinking provided the basis for a revolution in our attitudes to non human animals. Thus a Darwinian left would work towards a higher moral status for nonhuman animals, and a less anthropocentric view of our dominance over nature. Here we recognize Singers familiar profile as a supporter of animal rights (and of euthanasia and infanticidefor humans at least). And here is also where his real interest lies: in supporting an ethic of impartial concern for all sentient beings. But how to support such an ethic? Having ardently courted evolutionary psychology through most of the book, in the final pages Singer drops it suddenly like an old mistress when true love comes along. And true love for Singer is . . . reason. In some unexplained way, natural selection has made us reasoning beings, which enables us to transcend the impulses instilled by natural selection. Through reason we are able to develop genuine altruism, not merely kin altruism or enlightened selfinterest. We do not know, Singer writes wistfully, to what extent our capacity to reason can . . . take us beyond the conventional Darwinian constraints on the degree of altruism that a society may be able to foster. In other words, Darwinian evolution has produced a capacityreasonthat transcends Darwinian evolution. Singer hopes that the insights of reason may eventually overcome the pull of other elements in our evolved nature until we embrace the idea of an impartial concern for all of our fellow humans, or, better still, for all sentient beings. Singer doesnt account for this novel capacity that frees us to act against our evolved naturehe simply pulls it out of a hat. Quoting archDarwinian Richard Dawkins, he holds out the prospect of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruismsomething that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. In other words, reason is presented as a mysterious capacity capable of creating something de novo, something that has never existed beforeone might even say ex nihilo. With this godlike power, we can rise above our evolutionary origins. Although we are built as gene machines, he says, quoting Dawkins again, we have the power to turn against our creators. The eloquence of Singers language signals that here we have tapped his most ardent beliefs. This is not Singer the thinking machine, as he has been labeled for his cool, calculating utilitarianism regarding euthanasia and infanticide. No, this is Singer the true believer. Here reason is treated as far more than a utilitarian instrument. It is nothing less than the means of achieving freedommetaphysical and moral freedom. Singer alludes to Hegel, who portrayed the culmination of history as a state of Absolute Knowledge, in which Mind knows itself for what it is, and hence achieves its own freedom. We dont have to buy Hegels metaphysics to see that something similar really has happened in the last fifty years, Singer enthuses: For the first time since life emerged from the primeval soup, there are beings who understand how they have come to be what they are. In short, through scientific rationality, Hegels vision of absolute freedom now shows promise of realization: In a more distant future that we can still barely glimpse, [scientific knowledge] may turn out to be the prerequisite for a new kind of freedom. This is an astonishing finale to a book that is otherwise sober and restrained. Singer prides himself on being a realist, offering a sharply deflated vision of the left, its utopian ideas replaced by a coolly realistic view of what can be achieved. That may be true when he describes the biological constraints on human possibilities. But when he promises a new kind of freedom from those same biological constraints, he becomes a flaming utopian, as passionate as any revolutionary. In the end, Singers hope of giving the left a solid basis in science failsnot merely because of ongoing debates over whether Darwinism really explains human behavior but because Darwinism is ultimately irrelevant to his moral vision. Darwinism has its uses in debunking Christian theology, but when it comes to constructing his own ethic, Singer makes a leap of faith to a mystical notion of reason that transcends Darwinian biology. Needless to say, such a leap renders Singers position hopelessly selfcontradictory. For the same Darwinian premise that undercuts morality by rendering all behavior merely survival strategies, also undercuts epistemology by rendering the ideas in our minds likewise merely survival strategies. As Richard Rorty has written, keeping faith with Darwin means understanding that the human species is not oriented toward Truth, but only toward its own increased prosperity. Truth claims are just tools to help us get what we want. Or as Patricia Churchland puts it, an improvement in an organisms cognitive faculties will be selected for only if it enhances the organisms chances of survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost. Darwin himself wrestled repeatedly with the skeptical consequences of his theory. Just one example: With me, he wrote, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of mans mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. (Significantly, Darwin always expressed this horrid doubt after admitting an insistent inward conviction that the universe is not the result of chance after all, but requires an intelligent Mind, a First Cause. In other words, he applied his skepticism selectively: when reason led to a theistic conclusion, he argued that evolution discredits reason. But since reason was also the means by which he constructed his own theory, he was cutting off the branch he was sitting on.) Similar selfcontradictions are endemic in the literature on evolutionary psychology. A prime example is The Moral Animal, where author Robert Wright spends hundreds of pages describing human beings as robots, puppets, machines, and Swiss watches programmed by natural selection. He insists that biochemistry governs all and that free will is sheer illusion. He unmasks our noblest moral impulses as survival stratagems of the genes, as mere devices switched on and off in keeping with selfinterest. But then, in a grand leap of faith, Wright insists that we are now free to choose our moral ideals, and he urges us to practice brotherly love and boundless empathy. This persistent inner contradiction stems from the fact that evolutionary psychology is essentially a search for a secular morality. Darwinism cut the modern world loose from religious traditions and systems of meaning; the result is a culture adrift in a sea of relativism. Now Darwinism is itself being plumbed as a source of meaning, a cosmic guide for the problems of living. Yet the Darwinist view of human nature is so negative, so counter to traditional notions of human dignity, morality, and reason (not to mention common sense), that there is an almost irresistible impulse to take a leap of faith back to those traditional notions, no matter how unsupported by the theory. For who can live with a theory that tells us that ethics is illusory, and that morality is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends, in the words of Michael Ruse and E. O. Wilson? Who can live with a theory that tells us that if natural selection is both sufficient and true, it is impossible for a genuinely disinterested or altruistic behavior pattern to evolve, in the words of M. T. Ghiselin? Peter Singer, for one, cannot. One solution would have been to revive the traditional theism that made disinterested altruism a moral ideal in the first place (albeit with a distinction between humans and other sentient beings). Instead, he tries to graft that moral ideal onto the Darwinian tree. The graft will not take, and the result is a fatal incoherence. Nancy Pearcey is a fellow of the Discovery Institutes Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture and managing editor of the journal Origins and Design. She is coauthor (with Charles Colson) of How Now Shall We Live? Print this article Subscribe to the magazine: FIRST THINGS
Burrow, Evolution and SocietyThis review appeared in Cambridge Review 10 June 1967, pp. 409-11.
Review of Burrow, Evolution and Society | Home - Robert M. Young | What's New | Search | Feedback | Guestbook | Contact Us | The Writings of Professor Robert M. Young 'Review of Burrow, Evolution and Society' 17k John Burrow was working on evolutionary social theory while I was working on the wider Victorian debate on evolution and 'man's place in nature'. His excellent book came out just as I was tapped to give a Special Subject in the History Tripos, and he was (unjustly, in my view) obliged to move to Sussex. I took this opportunity to lament his departure. The review appeared in Cambridge Review 10 June 1967, pp. 409-11. Download View Online The Human Nature Review Ian Pitchford and Robert M. Young - Last updated: 06 August, 1998 08:43 AM | Human Nature | Books and Reviews | The Human Nature Daily Review | Search |
'How The Mind Works' by Stephen PinkerReview by John Sloss.
MYSTERIES OF THE MIND REVERSED.`How The Mind Works' by Stephen PinkerThe Penguin Press, 1998. Up: MYSTERIES OF THE MIND REVERSED. `How The Mind Works' by Stephen Pinker The Penguin Press, 1998. (Book review intended for Nature) John Sloss The Mind is one of the great mysteries of our age. The problems of how meaning, consciousness, knowledge, and free will arise in physically deterministic lumps of flesh have exercised philosophers for centuries. Almost as mystifying are the riddles of how the mind extracts information about the world, and what constitutes the nature of thought. Then there are the problems of human behaviour; why do people persist in self-destructive behaviour? Why do we like art? Why do people watch films that make them cry? We make no headway because we lack the conceptual tools to frame the problems. Like the ancient Greeks looking at the stars, we do not know how to begin to make sense of them. Pinker admits that he does not know how the mind works, but claims to provide the conceptual scaffolding that renders these questions tractable. His thesis is that the puzzle of Mind has been downgraded from mysteries to mere problems. We may not know the solutions but we know where to look. This work is a remarkable achievement in exposition and breadth of application. The novice has a myriad of ideas meticulously and deftly unravelled, with clarity enhanced by analogies and anecdotes. The text is also aimed at professionals in this area, to whom it presents a global view of psychology, evolutionary biology and philosophy, in addition to its main thesis. Because of its breadth of cover, some of the controversial areas are underexplored. The book takes the form of the exposition of three theoretical stances; the Computational Theory of Mind, The Modularity of Mind and Evolutionary Psychology. These are applied to the psychology of vision, human reasoning patterns, kinship, social behaviour, the love of higher callings (e.g., art, music, humour, religion and philosophy), in an attempt to explain why events occur and how to investigate them. The Computational Theory of Mind solves the philosophical conundrum of how mental events (e.g., beliefs and desires) march in step with and cause physical events (e.g., my avoiding a speeding car) despite there already being a complete physical causation for the latter. It postulates that, like computers, the mind is a manipulator of physical symbols, which have both representational ,i.e., standing for particular entities in the outside world, and causal properties. The symbols are acted on by the machinery of the mind in a way that is blind to its semantics, but sensitive to its syntax (or structural form). The crux of this theory is that the syntactic manipulations of a symbol respect its semantics in a truth-preserving fashion. The Modularity of Mind states that the mind is not a single organ but a system of largely independent functional organs analogous to the organs in the body. Thus the mind is not a single general purpose intelligence, but a collection of competences each specialized for one function (e.g., stereoscopic vision). The modules are not discrete anatomical boxes, nor are they tightly sealed off from one another, communicating only through a few narrow pipelines. They are defined by the special things they do with the information available to them. The modules solve problems that are `ill-posed', they literally have no solution, by making assumptions about the nature of the world. Lastly Evolutionary Psychology, explains the mind as a complex adaptive design in terms of Natural Selection, specifically that the mind was designed to solve the everyday problems our foraging ancestors faced. Using Evolutionary Psychology we can reverse engineer the mind - once we know what forces shaped a system we can begin to understand its components. Pinker describes Marr's (1979) work on vision as the prime example of how the new framework is used for understanding cognition. Marr proposed that the function of the visual system was to provide a `description' of the world for all parts of the mind to exploit. Using the description as a goal, Marr was able to come up with a modular system implemented on computers that managed aspects of vision. Pinker proposes that this technique can be used to explain and model other apparently non-adaptive behaviour. The `gambler's fallacy' occurs when an individual thinks that a roulette ball must come to rest on black after six consecutive reds. This is illogical, but the module underlying this behaviour is designed to cope with real world problems in which events have natural durations, and therefore serves an adaptive purpose. His thesis also allows him to confront the philosophy of mind, not by solving the problems of consciousness or free will, but by declaring that our modular minds are not capable of solving these problems due to their selection for real-world problems. There are several criticisms of Pinker's exposition: Post-hoc theorizing: Evolutionary Psychology is used in after-the-fact explanations of seemingly non-adaptive behaviour. Despite his insistence that it be used solely for reverse engineering, the explanantion of the gambler's fallacy seems to fall into this category. Non-adaptive cases: Pinker admits that there are some sorts of behaviour which are non-adaptive. These can be accounted for as by-products of modules that are adaptive, but their presence seems to undermine the strength of Evolutionary Psychology in the motivation of the understanding of behaviour. If some behaviour is non-adaptive, how strong are his claims that the gambler's fallacy is really adaptive. `Weak' Modularity: The definition of module is imprecise - all it seems to amount to is that different parts of the brain perform different tasks. This does not seem a radical thesis. `Weak' Computational Theory of Mind: `Fuzzy' concepts generated by neural networks are included in his Computational theory alongside the `categorical' concepts of the symbol processor. Again, this threatens to render his thesis trivially true, as he implicitly admits by pitching his theory of mind against Descartes' discredited incorporeal soul. Despite this Pinker's work is a plausible and immensely readable attempt to locate the standpoint from which the mind should be studied. J.Sloss is a Postgraduate Student in the Department of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex, Brighton, Sussex, UK. Up: John Sloss, March 1988
'Animal traditions: Behavioural inheritance in evolution' reviewed by Herbert GintisA skeptical assessment by Herbert Gintis.
'Animal traditions: Behavioural inheritance in evolution' reviewed by Herbert Gintis
Human Nature and the Limits of Science by John Dupr"Dupr's Human Nature and The Limits of Science is not a successful attempt at providing a criticism of evolutionary psychology. Quite literally because it is not about evolutionary psychology, rather, as an extreme statement, it is about the author's prejudice of what evolutionary psychology is about," writes Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair in this detailed analysis.
'Human Nature and the Limits of Science' by John Dupre reviewed by Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair
Promiscuity (Tim Birkhead)Danny Yee reviews Tim Birkhead's evolutionary history of sperm competition and sexual conflict.
Promiscuity (Tim Birkhead) - book review Danny Yee's Book Reviews Subjects | Titles | Authors | Best Books | Search | Latest Promiscuity: An Evolutionary History of Sperm Competition and Sexual Conflict Tim Birkhead Faber Faber 2000 A book review by Danny Yee - 2000 http: dannyreviews.com Promiscuity is a tour of animal sexuality, exploring the effects of sperm competition and sex-based selective pressures on reproductive biology and behaviour. Birkhead begins with the history of sperm competition studies, from Darwin's work on sexual selection to Robert Trivers' work on parental investment and Geoff Parker's role as "the father of sperm competition". He also dismantles the wild but much-publicised "killer sperm" hypothesis of Baker and Bellis. Testing paternity can be difficult, but DNA-fingerprinting and molecular studies have produced some unexpected results, revealing much greater extra-pair paternity in some species than behavioural studies had suggested. Birkhead also touches on the "once cherished" notion of female sexual monogamy (it is in fact the exception rather than the rule) and the various forms of mate guarding or consortship. A chapter on genitalia describes the female oviductual "obstacle course", needed to keep out parasites and prevent infection, and then the testes, sperm production and storage systems (and their temperature sensitivity), and some of the diversity in penis form, function, and evolution. One remarkable case is a hermaphroditic slug where penises frequently become knotted during copulation, forcing individuals to bite their own penises off at the base to free themselves. This is followed by a chapter on sperm, ejaculates and ova mostly on sperm size and number and the role of seminal fluid. An extreme case here is a fruitfly where the seminal fluid not only kills sperm from other males but poisons the female, making repeated insemination fatal. There are less drastic reasons than this, however, why females attempt to control the number and source of sperm. Also covered briefly is the early history of reproductive biology : the debate between the ovists and spermists and Spallanzani's experimental work, including the first artificial insemination. Turning to copulation and insemination, Birkhead surveys the various approaches: from external broadcast to internal fertilisation, as well as "deviant" forms such as traumatic insemination through the body wall or skin (most spectacularly with the giant squid's 20cm long spermatophores). Copulation varies greatly in form the greater vasa parrot mates side-by-side and frequency a queen fire ant will mate once in her life, while a single female Soay sheep has been observed copulating 163 times with 7 males in a 5 hour period. Next comes a look at mechanisms of sperm competition. One common phenomenon is "last-male sperm precedence" where the sperm from the last insemination are used. Some clever experiments and field studies tease out possible mechanisms for this. And in some species there is tantalising evidence for cryptic female choice, where females exert post-copulatory control over which sperm are used. (One possibility is selection for genetic compatibility in species where inbreeding depression is a serious problem.) A final chapter looks at female promiscuity and its evolutionary origins. Birkhead confusingly appropriates the term "polyandry" from anthropology (where it is used for social systems in which women can have multiple husbands) in order to avoid the negative connotations of "promiscuity". Of course this didn't stop him, or perhaps his publisher, using "promiscuity" in the title and back cover blurb! Promiscuity can have obvious direct benefits a sufficient supply of sperm, "gifts" of various kinds that can accompany insemination, avoidance of rejection costs, and paternal care and there are also possible indirect genetic benefits (though testing for these is difficult). Birkhead has (like many scientists) a tendency to make more of his own specialty than is really warranted. At one point he writes: "because [sperm competition] dealt directly with variation in reproductive success its evolutionary significance was much more immediate than that of other behaviours, such as foraging". But organisms that starve to death before reaching sexual maturity can leave no offspring just as "immediate" an effect on their fitness. His approach is also focused on reproductive biology and not on intra-genomic and inter-sexual "conflict" and their effects on such mundane things as offspring size. While Birkhead is not afraid to venture into the more complex world of human sexuality, he clearly recognises the dangers of careless sociobiology. He even begins Promiscuity with a story about Italian men in the United States returning home to Italy to shoot a honey buzzard (a ritual supposed to ensure their wives will be faithful) while leaving their wives behind, unattended. But there are some slip ups. After a look at human paternity studies, for example, he comes to the carefully worded conclusion that "extra-pair paternity undoubtedly exists and ... its level in contemporary Western human society appears to be fairly modest compared with that of chimps and many socially monogamous bird species". But he then lurches immediately to "if further evidence was required that humans have evolved to deal with rather modest levels of sperm competition..." (my emphasis), simply assuming the extrapolation from modern Western populations to the very different environments of most of human evolutionary history. And on page 33 he writes that "the most obvious way in which men's preoccupation with paternity manifests itself is in jealousy", when it seems far more plausible that it is jealousy which drives more cognitive preoccupation with abstract notions of paternity. These are minor points, but this kind of thing tends to upset social scientists, so it's an area where biologists should be careful. 26 November 2000 External links: - buy from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk Related reviews: - books about evolution - books about sex - books about zoology - books published by Faber Faber %T Promiscuity %S An Evolutionary History of Sperm Competition and Sexual Conflict %A Birkhead, Tim %I Faber Faber %D 2000 %O paperback, bibliography, index %G ISBN 0571193609 %P xiii,272pp,8pp colour photos Subjects | Titles | Authors | Best Books | Search | Latest Book Reviews by Danny Yee
The Dream of the Human GenomeA review of Richard Lewontin's "It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and other Illusions".
It Ain't Necessarily So (Richard Lewontin) - review Danny Yee's Book Reviews Subjects | Titles | Authors | Best Books | Search | Latest It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions Richard Lewontin New York Review Books 2000 A book review by Danny Yee - 2001 http: dannyreviews.com It Ain't Necessarily So is a selection of book reviews originally published in the New York Review, in which Lewontin tackles topics in the philosophy, history, and politics of biology. Also included are some exchanges which followed the reviews and some updates written for this collection. Lewontin is an attractive stylist and a lively polemicist as well as an incisive thinker, and this collection shows him off to good effect, especially when the selection of books under review allows him to address topics in depth, in what are more essays than reviews. Some of the pieces are however a bit scattered and there is a degree of repetition between them, so anyone after a more systematic presentation of Lewontin's ideas should probably start with his books, perhaps with The Triple Helix, on genes and organisms and environments, or Human Diversity . The pieces are presented in chronological order. A 1981 review of Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man is really a brief essay on intelligence and intelligence testing. An update looks at newer evidence from a 1990 twin study in Minnesota. "A trait can be 100 percent heritable in the circumstances in which that heritability was measured, yet be easily changed. If that were not true, medical genetics would lose most of its interest. People with two copies of the mutation for Wilson's disease used to die in early adolescence or early adulthood with absolute certainty, because of the lack of a single enzyme. Now they survive by taking a simple pill that makes up for their chemical deficiency. Wilson's disease used to be 100 percent heritable, but is no longer. ... The "heritability" of a trait only measures the proportion of variation among people that is caused by the variation of their genes in the present array of environments and for that specific trait. Thus an estimate of the heritability of a characteristic has no predictive or programmatic value." Among the less focused reviews, "Darwin's Revolution" looks at a potpourri of eight books published around the Darwin centenary in 1982, spanning everything from creationism to history of science to debates within evolutionary biology to a popular introduction to evolution. "Darwin, Mendel, and the Mind" reviews biographies of Darwin, Mendel, and Lamarck and, for something completely different, Changeux's Neuronal Man. "The Science of Metamorphoses" has two separate parts, one on a biography of Jacques Loeb and the engineering approach to biology and the other on Edelman's Topobiology. "The Dream of the Human Genome" looks at nine books published around 1990, when the human genome project was just getting under way. In it Lewontin critiques the grandiose claims and hidden assumptions of the project, as well as highlighting the vested interests of the participants ("no prominent molecular biologist of my acquaintance is without a financial stake in the biotechnology business") and the controversies over the use of DNA forensic evidence. A decade later, that all holds up rather well, but an update considers recent developments. "Women versus the Biologists" looks at a whole collection of books by Ruth Hubbard, encompassing debates over the nature of biological and social differences between the sexes, and over women in science. And in "Sex, Lies, and Social Science" Lewontin critiques a 1994 survey of American sexual practices, focusing on the unreliability of self-reporting. In response to a claim in the resulting exchange that it was inappropriate for a biologist working on "simple" animals to review a book "formulating a social perspective on human sexual conduct in the United States", a rare autobiographical note illustrates how Lewontin's interests extend beyond the population genetics of fruit flies: "Although a biologist, I have a graduate degree in mathematical statistics and have taught the subject for forty years. About 10 percent of my technical publications, including a textbook of statistics, have been devoted to problems of statistical sampling, estimation, and hypothesis testing. More important, my biological work must be classified as methodological, my chief contribution to the field having been an analysis of the deep epistemological difficulties posed by the data of evolutionary genetics and the introduction of new experimental approaches specifically designed to overcome the ambiguities. Finally, my work on epistemological problems, produced both alone and with philosophers of science, appears in standard philosophical journals." It Ain't Necessarily So itself, though, is free from statistics. "The Confusion over Cloning" considers a 1997 report from a bioethics advisory commission on cloning, exploring the ways in which the assumptions of genetic determinism lead to confused thinking about the subject and explaining some of the real safety issues involved. And "Survival of the Nicest", a review of Sober and Wilson's Unto Others, considers the debate over the origins of altruism and the role of group selection. 13 August 2001 External links: - buy from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk - review and links at the Complete Review - details at New York Review Books Related reviews: - books by Richard Lewontin - books about biology - books about philosophy of science %T It Ain't Necessarily So %S The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions %A Lewontin, Richard %I New York Review Books %D 2000 %O hardcover %G ISBN 0940322102 %P xxv,330pp Subjects | Titles | Authors | Best Books | Search | Latest Book Reviews by Danny Yee
From Brains to Consciousness (Rose)A review of Stephen Rose's "From Brains to Consciousness Essays on the New Sciences of the Mind".
From Brains to Consciousness: Essays on the New Sciences of the Mind Danny Yee's Book Reviews Subjects | Titles | Authors | Best Books | Search | Latest From Brains to Consciousness: Essays on the New Sciences of the Mind Steven Rose (editor) Penguin 1998 A book review by Danny Yee - 1999 http: dannyreviews.com The essays in From Brains to Consciousness progress or, some will say, regress from straight science to attempts to connect that science with philosophical concepts such as consciousness. The latter are not overly successful, demonstrating the extent of the gulf that still separates science and philosophy in this area. If vague or unconvincing, however, they are nevertheless thought-provoking. The collection opens with two general essays on neurobiology (by John Parnavelas) and neurochemistry (by Trevor Robbins). On more specific topics, Larry R. Squire writes about memory and brain localisation, Tim Bliss about long term potentiation and the chemical basis for memory, and A. David Smith about aging and mental decline. These are all accessible introductions for the lay reader. Moving onto more controversial topics, Richard Bentall looks at psychiatric classification and diagnosis and argues that there will never be a theory of schizophrenia. In the other direction Tim Crow lurches from a vague argument for a biological basis to "the schizophrenia mutation" and then attempts to tie together schizophrenia, language, and hemispherical asymmetry with specific genes. (Given Rose's antipathy to this kind of sociobiology, I wonder if he didn't include such an extreme example deliberately.) Five essays attempt, in different ways, to connect neurobiology with consciousness. Roger Penrose offers his usual fare, mixing confusions about computability with speculative physics and arbitrary biochemistry to argue that no computer can understand. Richard Gregory argues that qualia are triggered by real-time afferent signals in order to distinguish them from memories ("flagging the present"). For Igor Aleksandr, a key component of consciousness is "iconic learning" in neural nets; for Susan Greenfield, a critical factor is the number of neurons corralled at any one time; and for Wolf Singer, consciousness and qualia have a social or cultural origin and can not, therefore, be understood as emergent properties of an isolated brain. From Brains to Consciousness concludes with an essay by Mary Midgley that places consciousness in a broader epistemological framework, arguing for a diversity of approaches "one world, but a big one". 30 September 1999 External links: - buy from Amazon.co.uk Related reviews: - books by Steven Rose - books about human biology - books about philosophy - books published by Penguin %T From Brains to Consciousness %S Essays on the New Sciences of the Mind %E Rose, Steven %I Penguin %D 1998 %O hardcover, index %G ISBN 0713991674 %P x,278pp Subjects | Titles | Authors | Best Books | Search | Latest Book Reviews by Danny Yee
Fruit fly geneticsFly: An Experimental Life' by Martin Brookes.
Guardian Unlimited | Archive Search Go to: Guardian Unlimited home UK news World news Newsblog ---------------------- Archive search Arts Books EducationGuardian.co.uk Film Football Jobs MediaGuardian.co.uk Money The Observer Politics Science Shopping SocietyGuardian.co.uk Sport Talk Technology Travel Been there ---------------------- Audio Email services Special reports The Guardian The northerner The wrap ---------------------- Advertising guide Crossword Soulmates dating Headline service Syndication services Events offers Help contacts Feedback Information GNL press office Living our values Newsroom Notes Queries Reader Offers Style guide Travel offers TV listings Weather Web guides Working at GNL ---------------------- Guardian Weekly Money Observer Public Networkhome UKnews Worldlatest Books Money Film Society TheObserver Politics Education Shopping Work Football Jobs Media Search Fruit fly genetics Martin Brookes on how a Russian-born biologist took the ordinary fruit fly, fused Darwin with genetics and created history Martin Brookes Guardian Thursday March 29, 2001 B iologists, like belly buttons, tend to fall into one of two categories, "innies" or "outies". Innies spend their entire working lives indoors. They are most comfortable sitting at the computer or laboratory bench and develop acute migraines when exposed to direct sunlight. To this group belong the biochemists, molecular biologists, geneticists and mathematical modellers. By contrast, outies are laboratory illiterate. They understand how to open the fridge door but that is as far as their indoor knowledge extends. None of this matters to an outie, of course. Outies are more interested in devoting all their energy to prodigious beard growth and memorising the Latin names of a thousand different bird species. Occasionally, however, you come across a third category of biologist, someone who is neither an innie, nor an outie, but an "in-betweenie". These are the rare individuals who feel equally at home in both artificial and natural light, people who can distinguish Petri dishes from pelicans, and can somehow manage to incorporate both into a single experiment. Perhaps the first and certainly the greatest example of an in-betweenie was Russian-born biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky. He showed what could be achieved when white coats were combined with wellingtons. Back in the 1930s, he began dusting down Darwinian evolution to leave it looking modern, shiny and new. In the early decades of the 20th century, with Darwin dead and Mendel on their minds, scientists were creating an entirely new way of looking at evolution. Instead of thinking about populations of plants and animals as collections of individuals, biologists like Dobzhansky began thinking exclusively in terms of genes and gene pools. As good as Darwin's evolutionary argument was, it had always lacked direct experimental evidence. By combining the fledgling science of genetics with Darwinian evolution, Dobzhansky gave Darwin's ideas the empirical kick up the backside they had been crying out for. But Dobzhansky's success was no solo affair. He would have got nowhere without his insect comrade, the fruit fly, Drosophila pseudoobscura. His choice of experimental organism may have seemed unusual. After all, Dobzhansky's tiny fruit flies were hardly a match for Darwin's finches, or so it seemed. But Dobzhansky chose wisely. By the 1930s, fruit flies had already proved themselves as pioneers in genetics research. They were cheap, prolific and easy to breed. They also had the biggest chromosomes that anyone had ever seen. Fruit flies, like footballers, produce immense quantities of saliva. The chromosomes inside the fruit fly's salivary glands are huge - a thousand times thicker than normal. Each chromosome is like a packet of spaghetti, made up of many parallel strands of DNA that have failed to separate. Chemical staining of these super-sized chromosomes reveals dark horizontal bands along their length, distinct landmarks corresponding to the positions of specific genes. When these chromosomes were first discovered in the 1930s, it was as revolutionary as the discovery of genetic fingerprints fifty years later. These super-sized chromosomes were like biological barcodes that gave biologists the first direct glimpse of genetic differences between individuals and populations. To Dobzhansky, the fruit fly chromosomes were a godsend and he spent years in the Californian wilderness collecting flies for analysis in the laboratory. His first discovery was that populations of flies living in different areas could be distinguished by the banding patterns of their chromosomes. In other words, populations were not genetically uniform, but differed from place to place. This may sound like common sense today and, even back then, it was what many biologists had suspected but it was the first time that anyone had provided the experimental proof. Yet more amazing was the discovery that these genetic differences were not static, but could change over remarkably short time scales. In the struggle for existence, natural selection favoured different chromosome types at different times of the year. These results were epoch-making for evolutionary biology. Because Darwinian natural selection had traditionally been considered a slow paced affair that was difficult - if not impossible - to test experimentally, critics had often dismissed the subject as unscientific. But here was a perfect demonstration of evolution in action. This was no million-year wait for a two millimetre increase in the length of a leg bone. This was evolutionary change in front of your very eyes. In accumulating genetic differences, Dobzhansky saw how two populations might also accumulate differences in body size, colour, genital architecture, behavioural idiosyncrasies, and a thousand other characteristics that could eventually make them reluctant or unable to mate with one another. In these distinct genetic profiles, Dobzhansky believed he was seeing the origin of species in its infancy. Dobzhansky had shown what was possible when scientists were willing to abandon their prejudices and break with tradition. His experiments with the fly brought about a sea change in evolutionary attitudes. Fruit fly genetics made evolution and the origin of species more credible to a once sceptical scientific community. Genetics not only tightened up Darwin's theory, it also turned evolutionary biology into a rigorous experimental science. Darwin would have given anything for a share of Dobzhansky's experimental spoils. Serves him right for looking at finches rather than flies. Fly: An Experimental Life, by Martin Brookes, is published by Weidenfeld Nicholson, 16.99. Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
The New Cognitive NeurosciencesDigital version of the text edited by Michael S. Gazzaniga. Requires institutional subscription and login.
CogNet Library: Gazzaniga Subscriber LOG IN Home Library News Jobs Seminars Calls for Papers Graduate Programs References Journals Books Conference Materials OpenCourseWare The CogNet Library : References Collection The New Cognitive Neurosciences : Table of Contents NEXT November 1999 ISBN 0-262-07195-9 1276 pp., 635 illus., 46 color $145.00 96.95 (CLOTH) From Bradford Books: The New Cognitive Neurosciences Second Edition Edited by Michael S. Gazzaniga Table of Contents Preface I. Development Introduction Pasko Rakic 1. Setting the Stage for Cognition: Genesis of the Primate Cerebral Cortex Pasko Rakic 2. Molecular Determinants of Regionalization of the Forebrain and Cerebral Cortex Pat Levitt 3. A Comparative Perspective on the Formation of Retinal Connections in the Mammalian Brain Leo M. Chalupa and Cara J. Wefers 4. Formation, Elimination, and Stabilization of Synapses in the Primate Cerebral Cortex Jean-Pierre Bourgeois, Patricia S. Goldman-Rakic, and Pasko Rakic 5. Merging Sensory Signals in the Brain: The Development of Multisensory Integration in the Superior colliculus Barry E. Stein, Mark T. Wallace, and Terrence R. Stanford 6. Visual Development: Psychophysics, Neural Substrates, and Causal Stories Davida Y. Teller 7. Specificity and Plasticity in Neurocognitive Development in Humans Helen J. Neville and Daphne Bavelier 8. Language, Mind, and Brain: Experience Alters Perception Patricia K. Kuhl II. Plasticity Introduction Ira B. Black 9. Molecular Mechanisms Underlying Learning-Related Long-Lasting Synaptic Plasticity Kelsey C. Martin, Dusan Bartsch, Craig H. Bailey, and Eric R. Kandel 10. Memory Consolidation and Long-Term Potentiation Gary Lynch 11. Trophic Interactions and Neuronal Plasticity Eric S. Levine and Ira B. Black 12. Stress, Sex, and the Structural and Functional Plasticity of the Hippocampus Bruce S. McEwen 13. Activity and the Development of the Visual Cortex: New Perspectives Lawrence C. Katz, Michael Weliky, and Justin C. Crowley 14. Development of Neural Maps: Molecular Mechanisms Renping Zhou and Ira B. Black 15. The Reorganization of Sensory and Motor Maps after Injury in Adult Mammals Jon H. Kaas 16. Cerebral Cortical Plasticity: Perception and Skill Acquisition Gregg H. Recanzone III. Sensory Systems Introduction J. Anthony Movshon and Colin Blakemore 17. Dynamics of Responses in Visual Cortex Robert Shapley and Dario Ringach 18. Binocular Neurons and the Perception of Depth Andrew J. Parker, Bruce G. Cumming, and Jon V. Dodd 19. Contextual Modulation in Primary Visual Cortex and Scene Perception Victor A. F. Lamme and Henk Spekreijse 20. Computational Neuroimaging: Color Representations and Processing Brian A. Wandell 21. A New Role for Cortical Area MT: The Perception of Stereoscopic Depth Gregory C. DeAngelis, Bruce G. Cumming, and William T. Newsome 22. Effects of Attention on Neuronal Response Properties in Visual Cerebral Cortex John H. R. Maunsell and Carrie J. McAdams 23. Response Synchronization: A Universal Coding Strategy for the Definition of Relations Wolf Singer 24. Lightness Perception and Lightness Illusions Edward H. Adelson 25. High-Level Vision as Statistical Inference Daniel Kersten 26. Perception and Action in the Human Visual System Melvyn A. Goodale 27. Visual Associative Long-Term Memory: Encoding and Retrieval in Inferotemporal Cortex of the Primate Yasushi Miyashita 28. Physiological Studies of Face Processing in Humans Gregory McCarthy 29. Physiological Basis of Timbre Perception Shihab A. Shamma 30. Cortical Representations of Auditory Space John C. Middlebrooks 31. Sensory Convergence in Neural Function and Development Andrew J. King and Jan W. H. Schnupp 32. The Song System: Neural Circuits Essential throughout Life for Vocal Behavior and Plasticity Allison J. Doupe, Michael S. Brainard, and Neal A. Hessler 33. A Computational Model of Avian Song Learning Kenji Doya and Terrence J. Sejnowski IV. Motor Systems Introduction Emilio Bizzi 34. Toward a Neurobiology of Coordinate Transformations Emilio Bizzi and Ferdinando A. Mussa-Ivaldi 35. Spatial Representations and Internal Models of Limb Dynamics in Motor Learning Claude Ghez, John W. Krakauer, Robert L. Sainburg, and Maria-Felice Ghilardi 36. Programming to Look and Reach in the Posterior Parietal Cortex R. A. Andersen, A. P. Batista, L. H. Snyder, C. A. Buneo, and Y. E. Cohen 37. Neural Mechanisms of Motor Cognitive Processes: Functional MRI and Neurophysiological Studies Apostolos P. Georgopoulos 38. Cortical Mechanisms Subserving Object Grasping and Action Recognition: A New View on the Cortical Motor Functions Giacomo Rizzolatti, Leonardo Fogassi, and Vittorio Gallese 39. Neural Mechanisms for Learning of Sequential Procedures O. Hikosaka, K. Sakai, H. Nakahara, X. Lu, S. Miyachi, K. Nakamura, and M. K. Rand 40. The Superior Colliculus and the Cognitive Control of Movement Robert H. Wurtz, Michele A. Basso, Martin Par, and Marc A. Sommer 41. The Neural Correlates of Place and Direction M. A. Wilson 42. Computational Motor Control Michael I. Jordan and Daniel M. Wolpert V. Attention Introduction Gregory J. DiGirolamo and Michael I. Posner 43. Attention in Cognitive Neuroscience: An Overview Michael I. Posner and Gregory J. DiGirolamo 44. Disorders of Visual Attention Lynn C. Robertson and Robert Rafal 45. Spatial Reference Frames and Hemispatial Neglect Marlene Behrmann 46. Cortical Mechanisms of Visuospatial Attention in the Primate Brain Leonardo Chelazzi and Maurizio Corbetta 47. The Operation of Selective Attention at Multiple Stages of Processing: Evidence from Human and Monkey Electrophysiology Steven J. Luck and Steven A. Hillyard 48. The Temporal Dynamics and Functional Architecture of Attentional Processes in Human Extrastriate Cortex George R. Mangun, Amishi P. Jha, Joseph B. Hopfinger, and Todd C. Handy 49. Networks of Attention David LaBerge VI. Memory Introduction Endel Tulving 50. Domain Specificity in Cognitive Systems Patricia S. Goldman-Rakic, Smas P. Scalaidhe, and Matthew V. Chafee 51. Learning and Memory in the Inferior Temporal Cortex of the Macaque Cynthia A. Erickson, Bharathi Jagadeesh, and Robert Desimone 52. Memory for Objects in Nonhuman Primates Elisabeth A. Murray 53. The Medial Temporal Lobe, the Hippocampus, and the Memory Systems of the Brain Larry R. Squire and Barbara J. Knowlton 54. The Anatomical Bases of Memory Hans J. Markowitsch 55. Psychopharmacological Approaches to Human Memory H. Valerie Curran 56. Memory Retrieval: An Electrophysiological Perspective Michael D. Rugg and Kevin Allan 57. Neuroimaging of Memory Randy L. Buckner 58. Memory without Remembering and Remembering without Memory: Implicit and False Memories Daniel L. Schacter and Tim Curran VII. Language Introduction Willem J. M. Levelt 59. The Neural Correlates of Language Production Peter Indefrey and Willem J. M. Levelt 60. The Study of Prelexical and Lexical Processes in Comprehension: Psycholinguistics and Functional Neuroimaging Dennis Norris and Richard Wise 61. Postlexical Integration Processes in Language Comprehension: Evidence from Brain-Imaging Research Colin M. Brown, Peter Hagoort, and Marta Kutas 62. Acquisition of Languages: Infant and Adult Data Jacques Mehler and Anne Christophe 63. The Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Acquisition Karin Stromswold 64. Computational Modeling of Language Disorders Eleanor M. Saffran, Gary S. Dell, and Myrna F. Schwartz 65. The Neural Architecture of Language Disorders Nina F. Dronkers, Brenda B. Redfern, and Robert T. Knight VIII. Higher Cognitive Functions Introduction Stephen M. Kosslyn and Edward E. Smith 66. The Neural Bases of Mental Imagery Martha J. Farah 67. Shared Mechanisms in Visual Imagery and Visual Perception: Insights from Cognitive Neuroscience Stephen M. Kosslyn and William L. Thompson 68. Cerebral Bases of Number Processing and Calculation Stanislas Dehaene 69. Cerebellar Contributions to Cognition and Imagery Richard B. Ivry and Julie A. Fiez 70. The Cognitive Neuroscience of Categorization Edward E. Smith and John Jonides 71. Category Specificity and the Brain: The Sensory Motor Model of Semantic Representations of Objects Alex Martin, Leslie G. Ungerleider, and James V. Haxby 72. The Organization of Conceptual Knowledge in the Brain Alfonso Caramazza 73. Decision Making and the Somatic Marker Hypothesis Daniel Tranel, Antoine Bechara, and Antonio R. Damasio IX. Emotion Introduction Joseph E. LeDoux 74. How Danger Is Encoded: Toward a Systems, Cellular, and Computational Understanding of Cognitive-Emotional Interactions in Fear Jorge L. Armony and Joseph E. LeDoux 75. Modulation of Memory Storage by Stress Hormones and the Amygdaloid Complex James L. McGaugh, Benno Roozendaal, and Larry Cahill 76. Neurophysiological Basis of Emotion in Primates: Neuronal Responses in the Monkey Amygdala and Anterior Cingulate Cortex Taketoshi Ono and Hisao Nishijo 77. Emotional Processing in the Human Brain Revealed through Functional Neuroimaging Raymond J. Dolan 78. Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Emotion, Conditioning, and Memory Roger K. Pitman, Arieh Y. Shalev, and Scott P. Orr 79. The Neuroscience of Affective Style Richard J. Davidson X. Evolution Introduction Leda Cosmides and John Tooby 80. Toward Mapping the Evolved Functional Organization of Mind and Brain John Tooby and Leda Cosmides 81. The Replacement of General-Purpose Learning Models with Adaptively Specialized Learning Modules C. R. Gallistel 82. Social Control of Brains: From Behavior to Genes Russell D. Fernald and Stephanie A. White 83. What Sex Differences in Spatial Ability Tell Us about the Evolution of Cognition David F. Sherry 84. What's Human about the Human Brain? Todd M. Preuss 85. Theory of Mind as a Mechanism of Selective Attention Alan M. Leslie 86. The Cognitive Neuroscience of Autism: Evolutionary Approaches Simon Baron-Cohen 87. The Cognitive Neuroscience of Social Reasoning Leda Cosmides and John Tooby XI. Consciousness Introduction Daniel L. Schacter 88. The Nature and Function of Consciousness: Lessons from Blindsight Gven Gzeldere, Owen Flanagan, and Valerie Gray Hardcastle 89. Some Thoughts on Consciousness and Neuroscience Christof Koch and Francis Crick 90. Conscious vs. Unconscious Perception Philip M. Merikle and Meredyth Daneman 91. The Neural Correlates of Consciousness: An Analysis of Cognitive Skill Learning Marcus E. Raichle 92. Prefrontal Cortex, Time, and Consciousness Robert T. Knight and Marcia Grabowecky 93. Consciousness: Its Vicissitudes in Waking and Sleep J. Allan Hobson, Edward F. Pace-Schott, and Robert Stickgold 94. Consciousness, Introspection, and the Split-Brain: The Two Minds One Body Problem Kathleen Baynes and Michael S. 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Advances in Biological PsychiatryThe Karger series of books focusing on biological determinants of behavior and psychopathology.
Karger Publishers Titel Index Book Series Non-serial Titles Book News Advances in Biological Psychiatry Editor(s): Ebert,D. (Freiburg); Ebmeier,K.P. (Edinburgh); Kaschka,W.P. (Ulm); Gattaz,W.F. (Sao Paulo) ISSN0378-7354 Status: active Novel data and theories to advance our understanding of mental illness Biological psychiatry contributes a new and exciting dimension to the knowledge of abnormal human behavior. By focussing on the biological determinants of behavior and psychopathology, the volumes in the series provide clinicians and researchers with timely updates on the most significant work conducted in selected areas internationally. Most significant progress comes from interdisciplinary collaboration, so that methodological contributions from the biological and psychological sciences are juxtaposed with clinical and more practical updates. Advances in Biological Psychiatry volumes are listed in bibliographic services including Current Contents, Reference Update, Biological Abstracts. Field(s) of Interest Further Reading: Psychiatry Free Alert Vol. 22, 2003 Editor(s): Ebmeier,K.P. (Edinburgh) SPECT in Dementia Summarizing the present state of knowledge Vol. 21, 2002 Editor(s): Kaschka,W.P. (Ulm) Perspectives in Affective Disorders International Symposium '25 Years Weissenau Depression Unit', Weissenau, September 2001 A survey of current approaches Vol. 20, 2001 Editor(s): Sperner-Unterweger,B. (Innsbruck); Fleischhacker,W.W. (Innsbruck); Kaschka,W.P. (Ulm) Psychoneuroimmunology Hypotheses and Current Research 6th Expert Meeting on Psychoimmunology, Innsbruck, January 2000 From basic neuroimmunology to immunological dysfunctions in psychiatric disorders Vol. 19, 1998 New Models for Depression Vol. 18, 1997 Immunological Alterations in Psychiatric Diseases Vol. 17, 1988 Selective 5-Ht Reuptake Inhibitors: Novel or Commonplace Agents? Vol. 16, 1987 Neurophysiological Correlates of Relaxation and Psychopathology Vol. 15, 1984 Neurophysiological Correlates of Mental Disorders Vol. 14, 1984 Serotonin in Affective Disorders Vol. 13, 1983 Neurophysiological Correlates of Normal Cognition and Psychopathology Vol. 12, 1983 Research on the Viral Hypothesis of Mental Disorders Vol. 11, 1983 Biological Rhythms and Behavior Vol. 10, 1983 Management of Depressions with Monoamine Precursors Vol. 9, 1982 Electrophysiological Correlates of Psychopathology Vol. 8, 1982 Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, Mania and Schizophrenia and the Limbic System Vol. 7, 1981 Depressive Illness Vol. 6, 1981 Electroneurophysiology and Psychopathology Vol. 5, 1980 Psychoneuroendocrinology and Abnormal Behavior Vol. 4, 1980 Clinical Neurophysiological Aspects of Psychopathological Conditions Vol. 3, 1979 Alcoholism: A Multidisciplinary Approach Vol. 2, 1978 Childhood Psychopharmacology: Current Concepts Vol. 1, 1978 Minimal Brain Dysfunction: Fact or Fiction 2005 S. Karger AG, Basel
Thomas Henry Huxley - Autobiography and Selected EssaysOnline book.
CONTENTS: THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND SELECTED ESSAYS DARWIN DARWINISM | Home | Human Nature Review | What's New | Search | Top Ten Bestsellers (continuously updated): brain evolution , Charles Darwin , Richard Dawkins , Daniel Dennett , Stephen Gould , evolutionary epistemology , evolutionary esthetics , evolutionary ethics , evolutionary politics , evolutionary psychology , human evolution , human genetics , Steven Pinker , sociobiology , Alfred Russel Wallace . THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND SELECTED ESSAYS Amazon US | UK CONTENTS: PREFACE INTRODUCTION The Life of Huxley Subject-matter, Structure, and Style of Essays AUTOBIOGRAPHY ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE A LIBERAL EDUCATION ON A PIECE OF CHALK THE PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION THE METHOD OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS NOTES human-nature.com Ian Pitchford and Robert M. Young - Last updated: 23 January, 2002 07:34 AM US - Search: All Products Books Popular Music Classical Music DVD Video Keywords: UK - Search: All Products Books Popular Music Classical Music DVD Video Keywords: | Human Nature | The Human Nature Daily Review | Evolutionary Psychology Online |
Understanding Violence Against WomenNancy A. Crowell and Ann W. Burgess, Editors; Panel on Research on Violence Against Women, National Research Council. Complete online publication from the National Academy Press.
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Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 4National Academy Press complete online text.
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Tempo and Mode in EvolutionGenetics and Paleontology 50 Years After Simpson. Walter M. Fitch and Francisco J. Ayala, Editors, for the National Academy of Sciences. The full text is available here.
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Shaping the Future: Biology and Human ValuesComplete text online from National Academy Publishing.
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The Psychological Well-Being of Nonhuman PrimatesComplete online publication from the National Academy Press.
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Modeling Human and Organizational Behavior: Application to Military SimulationsRichard W. Pew and Anne S. Mavor, Editors; Panel on Modeling Human Behavior and Command Decision Making: Representations for Military Simulations, National Research Council. Complete text online.
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In the Mind's Eye:Online publication.
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Genetics and the Origin of SpeciesFrom Darwin to Molecular Biology 60 Years After Dobzhansky. The full text of the book is available online in multiple formats.
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Science and CreationismComplete online book from the National Academy Press.
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Learning, Remembering, BelievingNational Academy Press publication available online.
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Uncommon Measures: Equivalence and Linkage Among Educational TestsMichael J. Feuer, Paul W. Holland, Bert F. Green, Meryl W. Bertenthal, and F. Cadell Hemphill, Editors; Committee on Equivalency and Linkage of Educational Tests, National Research Council. Complete text online.
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Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 1National Academy Press complete online volume.
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Evaluating Human Genetic DiversityCommittee on Human Genome Diversity, National Research Council. The full text is available online.
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The Effects of a Threatening Rumor on a Disaster-Stricken CommunityDisaster Research Group, Division of Anthropology and Psychology, National Academy of Sciences, 1958. A complete online volume from the National Academy Press.
Nat'l Academies Press: The Effects of a Threatening Rumor on a Disaster-Stricken Community Read more than 3,000 books online FREE! More than 900 PDFs now available for sale HOME ABOUT NAP CONTACT NAP HELP NEW RELEASES ORDERING INFO Items in cart [0] TRY OUR SPECIAL DISCOVERY ENGINE: Questions? Call 888-624-8373 SEARCH THIS BOOK This Title is Not For Sale The Effects of a Threatening Rumor on a Disaster-Stricken Community Disaster Research Group, Division of Anthropology and Psychology, National Academy of Sciences 116 pages, 8.5 x 11, 1958 Related Links: National Research Council (NRC) More Titles from NRC Related Titles Find More Like This Book Research Dashboard NEW! [ Top of Page ] [ Home ] [ Contact Us ] [ Help ] [ The National Academies Home ] Copyright 2005. National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. 500 Fifth St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20001. Terms of Use and Privacy Statement
Discovering the BrainSandra Ackerman for the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences. A complete online volume.
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Computer Science and Artificial IntelligencePanel on Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, National Research Council, 1997. A complete online volume from the National Academy Press.
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Bridging Disciplines in the Brain, Behavioral, and Clinical SciencesTerry C. Pellmar and Leon Eisenberg, Editors; Committee on Building Bridges in the Brain, Behavioral, and Clinical Sciences; Division of Neuroscience and Behavioral Health. A complete online volume.
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Assessing Genetic RisksA complete book from the National Academy Press available online.
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Cells and SurveysShould Biological Measures Be Included in Social Science Research? Caleb E. Finch, James W. Vaupel, and Kevin Kinsella, Editors; Committee on Population, National Research Council. The full text is here.
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Behavioral Measures of NeurotoxicityOnline publication.
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Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth CenturyA classic text on cerebral localization and its biological context from Gall to Ferrier.
Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier by Robert M Young | Home - Robert M. Young | What's New | Search | Feedback | Contact Us | Robert M. Young Home Page Index of writings by Robert M. Young Email Robert M. Young Process Press Science as Culture Free Associations Kleinian Studies Human Relations, Authority and Justice Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier by Robert M. Young [ Preface | Introduction | Chapter: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Bibliography ] Amazon US | UK The mind-body problem has lain at the heart of the way we think about human nature throughout modern thought. It became a problem for science in the early nineteenth century when efforts were first made to provide systematic observations on the relationship between mind and brain. This work became increasingly experimental as researchers sought to localise functions in the brain. This study in the history of ideas traces the problem of localisation of function from the first empirical to the first experimental work on the topic. However, it is much more that, which is why it has been reprinted in a series of neurological classics. The author has cast his net widely and framed his account in terms of the history of ideas about human nature and the movement of the psychological aspect of the problem from philosophical questions framed in terms of epistemology to those considered as apart of a biological approach to human nature. The crucial question on which he focuses is that of how we decide what the functions of the brain are to be: The history of various concepts of function is the history of psychology. Particular attention is paid to the disciplines which fed into modern approaches to mind and brain: phrenology, sensory-motor physiology, associationist psychology and the theory of evolution as applied to the study of psychology. In a new preface the author links this monograph to his ongoing investigations of the three great founders of the modern understanding of humanity: Darwin, Marx and Freud. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970; reprinted New York: Oxford University Press, History of Neuroscience Series, 1990 Pp. xxiv+278 Robert M. Young, PhD is Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies at the Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield and Co-Director of the Institute of Human Relations, New Bulgarian University, Sofia. He is the Editor of the quarterly journals Free Associations: Psychoanalysis, Groups, Politics, Culture and Science as Culture, Co-Editor of Human Relations, Authority and Justice and Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Studies. He is also a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice. Some comments: Everyone recognises Mind, Brain and Adaptation as a reference point, and it is always cited in histories of brain... It is not just an account of nineteenth-century brain theories but uncovers the central arguments in an attempt to construct a science of mind. ___Roger Smith, historian of science, author of Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain and The Fontana History of the Human Sciences His book as a whole seems a model for the writing of the history of science. As, perhaps, a good historian of science must be, he is much more than a historian. Of the continuing and current conceptual problems of psychology he shows an awareness which neuro-physiologists who write on mind and brain might be encouraged, by reading his book, to share. _____P. F. Strawson, Professor of Philosophy, Oxford, author of Individuals: an Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (writing in the N. Y. Review of Books) This is a volume of unusual excellence. Read it. ____Mary A. B. Brazier, neurophysiologist (writing in Science) It must be the most important work upon the evolution of thought upon the results of cerebral function written in the decade now ending. ____Denis Williams (writing in Brain) [Mind, Brain and Adaptation] is a modern classic. ____Peter Gay, author of Freud: A Life for Our Time Contents New Preface vii and Preface xix Introduction 1 1 Gall and Phrenology: Speculation versus Observation versus Experiment 9 2 Experimental Sensory-Motor Physiology and the Association Psychology 54 3 Alexander Bain: Transition from Introspective Psychology to Experimental Psychophysiology 101 4 Pierre Paul Broca and the Seat of the Faculty of Articulate Language 134 5 Herbert Spencer: Phrenology, Evolutionary Associationism and Cerebral Localization 150 6 Spencer, Jackson, Carpenter and the Application of Sensory-Motor Localization to the Cerebral Cortices 197 7 Fritsch and Hitzig and the Localized Electrical Excitability of the Cerebral Hemispheres 224 8 David Ferrier: Localization of Sensory-Motor Psychophysiology 234 9 Conclusion 249 Bibliography 253 and Index 273 The Human Nature Review Ian Pitchford and Robert M. 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Did the Caveman Teach Us to Queue?Chris Horrie provides a critique of the discipline in this BBC News article.
BBC News | UK | Did the caveman teach us to queue? low graphics version | feedback | help You are in: UK Front Page World UK England Northern Ireland Scotland Wales UK Politics Business Sci Tech Health Education Entertainment Talking Point In Depth AudioVideo Friday, 23 February, 2001, 11:27 GMT Did the caveman teach us to queue? The cult of evolutionary psychology has received another boost with the theory we were born to queue. But, asks Chris Horrie, can caveman behaviour really explain everything we do? Psychologists have announced that the famously British propensity to stand in a queue has roots stretching back 30,000 years to the behaviour of semi-naked ape-men struggling for survival on the African savannah. According to the theory, early humans who copied the behaviour of others tended to live longer and, therefore, had a better chance of reproducing and passing on the behaviour to later generations. Those who did not, died out. It's only a small step from going out to kill a wild boar The queuing claim is only the latest in a welter of theories in the field of evolutionary psychology. In the last few years evolutionary psychology has been used to explain everything from consumer behaviour in supermarkets, to management theory, sexual attractiveness, divorce, war, football, road rage and even a supposed male propensity to rape. According to the theory, people eat too much because, as cavemen, we never knew where the next meal was coming from. Possibly there were Neanderthals who counted the calories, but the chances are they died out during the frequent famines of stone-age life, having failed to build up enough fat. Self help Likewise, according to the theory, early men learned to lust after women displaying the physical signs of fertility - thus ensuring the genetic traits which made women look fertile in the first place. Husbands are unfaithful because spreading their seed helped men reproduce their genes. Men lust after playboy bunnies and supermodels because they learned that an hourglass figure was a sign of high fertility New York Times columnist Erica Goode It is also claimed that the supposed modern female preference for physically strong men has similar ancient, biological roots. In recent years, discussion of evolutionary psychology has passed from university lecture theatres into the media, popular books, "how to" management theory and the developed world's booming "self-help" sector. Two months ago a book called Mean Genes, containing a popular "self-improvement" version of the theory, became a best seller in the United States. The book's co-author, Harvard Business School guru Terry Burnham, writes: "Ancient and selfish, our genes influence us every day in almost every way." The caveman within Businesses which recognise the essential caveman hiding within their staff and customers do better than those who delude themselves that modern people are more than a monkeys with clothes, driven solely by the most base physical instincts. Critical: professor Steven Rose Behind the wave of interest in evolutionary psychology lies one of the longest running conundrums chewed over by thinkers: is human behaviour and personality determined mainly by social environment or by genetic make-up? The debate over the role of "nature v nurture" in determining human behaviour has raged since classical times, with the pendulum swinging first one way and then the other. At the moment the "nature" camp is making the running, as the enthusiasm for evolutionary psychology seems to indicate. But the theory also has many critics. Last month no less than 16 British and American psychologists and scientists lined up to denounce evolutionary psychology despite its growing popularity. Making your genes work for you The counter-claims came in a book of essays edited by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose of the Open University, entitled Alas, Poor Darwin. Evolutionary psychology, says Professor Rose, has become popular with professional academics because "talking about genes is powerful talk against the background of the Human Genome Project - psychologists are scrambling to get on the 'hard science' bandwagon". The idea, he says, that behaviour in a bus queue can be linked to human genetic evolution, is "just laughable". The popular appeal of the theory, he believes, is explained its concentration on sexual attractiveness. 'Talking dirty' "There's a lot of talking dirty in evolutionary psychology. Lots of discussion of how women look and how to attract a mate - stuff about the importance of women having small waists and big hips on the grounds of 'survival of the fittest'. But it's all nonsense." An early advocate of football and shopping? Given that there are some cultures where the wearing of a five inch plate inside the upper lip is seen as the ultimate in sexual attractiveness, it is perhaps hard to see the advantage such behaviour provides in terms of Darwinian "natural selection". Sometimes, Professor Rose thinks, the whole theory seems like a cross between the thinking of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and Adolf Hitler - except that evolutionary biology is not racist. Some of its most extreme critics say "EP" has a "direct intellectual lineage" from Nazism and the idea that people can be improved - just like animals - by selective breeding and eugenics. Others object to the theory's "sexism" which, controversially, can be seen as an apology for rape. The critics nevertheless admit that some human traits, such as breathing, sleeping and eating, are evolutionary and not "learned" Some even concede evolutionary explanations of sexual attractiveness may have some validity. But, the critics say, human behaviour is more complex than evolution and results from a mixture of biology, environment, culture, learning, moral choice and free will. For many, their mantra remains: "Biology is not destiny". Search BBC News Online Advanced search options BBC RADIO NEWS BBC ONE TV NEWS WORLD NEWS SUMMARY BBC NEWS 24 BULLETIN PROGRAMMES GUIDE See also: 24 Jun 99|Sci Tech Women's choice of men goes in cycles Internet links: Queue here for the secret of mankind British Psychological Society The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites Top UK stories now: Postcode lottery in GP services Leanne killer jailed for life Tories attack Brixton drugs scheme Straw defends arms sales change IVF mix-up heads for court Police shoot man on the M6 New challenge excites Venables Judge urges life sentence shake-up Links to more UK stories are at the foot of the page. E-mail this story to a friend Links to more UK stories In This Section Postcode lottery in GP services Leanne killer jailed for life Tories attack Brixton drugs scheme Straw defends arms sales change IVF mix-up heads for court Police shoot man on the M6 New challenge excites Venables Judge urges life sentence shake-up Channel 4 boss warns of cuts Inquiry into warship accident Chicken checked for BSE Home collapses after council dig Schoolboy 'murdered for 10 debt' 'Scout leader' guilty of sex offences Blair's right-hand men under the spotlight Parents to sue over epilepsy row Parents' court battle over MMR jab Scots killed in Alps fall Margaret Cook blasts 'NHS meddling' Drumcree violence 'unacceptable' Transplant first for cancer patient Husband jailed for rape attack GM crop trial sites announced Britain 'sheltering al-Qaeda leader' Healthy eating in schools 'backfires' Political donation rules 'being broken' Soap actor killed in holiday fall Church debates links with state Troubled start to marching season Link between poverty and truancy Mobile phone giant denies pension risk Clampdown on illegal food imports Abortion plans 'irresponsible' Disabled pulled from burning minibus Blunkett to review police reforms 'My mission with the UK marines' Facing up to life with HIV Blame it on the driver Phones, tones and mobile music Amazing tales from Planet Tabloid The return of the seagulls Does my bum look big in this Boeing? Quiz of the week's news Papers capture Drumcree violence ^^ Back to top News Front Page | World | UK | UK Politics | Business | Sci Tech | Health | Education | Entertainment | Talking Point | In Depth | AudioVideo ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To BBC Sport | To BBC Weather ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MMIII | News Sources | Privacy
Baboon Key to Human StressArticle describes how the stresses and strains that afflict humans are evident in baboon societies. Also suggests that both species share the long-term health effects.
BBC NEWS | In Depth | San Francisco | Baboon key to human stress CATEGORIES TV RADIO COMMUNICATE WHEREILIVE INDEX SEARCH You are in: In Depth: San Francisco News Front Page World UK England N Ireland Scotland Wales Politics Business Entertainment Science Nature Technology Health Education ------------- Talking Point ------------- Country Profiles In Depth ------------- Programmes ------------- SERVICES Daily E-mail News Ticker Mobile PDAs ------------- Text Only Feedback Help EDITIONS Change to World Sunday, 18 February, 2001, 20:51 GMT Baboon key to human stress Baboons feel the "rat race" too The stresses and strains that afflict humans are evident in baboon societies - as are the long-term health effects. The findings of physiologist Robert Sapolsky may suggest ways of limiting the impact of mankind's modern, stressful lifestyle. And cultivating friendships, he suggests, may be the way to alleviate harmful long-term stresses. In many ways, the life lived by baboons holds echoes of our own. Their societies, like Western ones, are rarely threatened by famine, plague or predators - so they invent their own ways of generating stress. Professor Sapolsky gave details of his work to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Francisco. Fighting males His study claims to be able to spot "Type A" baboons, who cannot cope with stress, and suggests that there may be ways to spot humans who fall into the same group. Professor Sapolsky said: "We're ecologically privileged enough that we can invent social and physiological stress. Baboons are similarly privileged. They ulcerate because of social complexities." Professor Sapolsky, from Stanford University, studied the Serengeti baboons. He anaesthetised them and then collected blood samples to reveal levels of stress hormones, antibodies, and cholesterol. Those with consistently high levels of stress hormones were showing the physical signs: high levels of the "wrong" sort of cholesterol, increased blood pressure and hardening of the arteries. Certain situations were found to be more stressful for the baboons in the study, most of whom were male. Baboons who sensed a problem and started a fight were less stressed than those who sat back and worried if a fight was about to start. Damaged brain In a stable hierarchy, stress levels were lower, while the introduction of a new baboon sent stress hormones up. And males who spent most time grooming and being groomed by females not in heat and playing with infants had the lowest levels of stress hormones. Other studies carried out by Professor Sapolsky on rats suggest that the brain cells which control stress levels can actually be damaged if the individual is too stressed. Continually elevated levels of stress hormones appear to damage the hippocampus, an area of the brain which also has a role in learning and memory. Moderate stress, however, appeared to be good for the brain, he said. Science festival news See also: 20 Jan 00|Health Mondays 'bring heart attacks' 13 Feb 01|Health Bullying bosses 'cause sickness' 30 Jan 01|Health 'Most workers stressed' 29 Jan 01|Health Caffeine 'reduces productivity' 20 Jan 01|Health Personality 'influences immune system' Internet links: American Association for the Advancement of Science Stanford University The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites Top San Francisco stories now: Synthetic virus nearing reality Perfect pitch may help babies speak 'Hungry' stars reveal planet presence Code crackers to settle differences Biotechnology in the front line Umbilical cords to repair brain damage Scientists demand 'fish parks' Kilimanjaro's white peak to disappear Links to more San Francisco stories are at the foot of the page. E-mail this story to a friend Links to more San Francisco stories In This Section Synthetic virus nearing reality Perfect pitch may help babies speak 'Hungry' stars reveal planet presence Code crackers to settle differences Biotechnology in the front line Umbilical cords to repair brain damage Scientists demand 'fish parks' Kilimanjaro's white peak to disappear Titanic director aims for the skies Life expectancy of 100 'unrealistic' Stem cell hope for Parkinson's Need for hazard prediction Juries 'deaf to earwitness failings' Cattle feed could eliminate 'burger bug' Strategy to beat alien species Brain scan aid to dyslexics Tumour blitz advance Snakes, spiders, cups and hammers Baboon key to human stress 'Viagra principle' harnessed Genome probes 'cures that kill' Intensive therapy forces brain to re-learn Health risks from crowded Earth Atlas shows man's 'footprint' on the planet ^^ Back to top News Front Page | World | UK | England | N Ireland | Scotland | Wales | Politics | Business | Entertainment | Science Nature | Technology | Health | Education | Talking Point | Country Profiles | In Depth | Programmes ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To BBC Sport | To BBC Weather | To BBC World Service ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MMIII | News Sources | Privacy
Mozart 'can cut epilepsy'Music, particularly Mozart, could have a therapeutic effect on epilepsy, say scientists.
BBC News | HEALTH | Mozart 'can cut epilepsy' low graphics version | feedback | help You are in: Health Front Page World UK UK Politics Business Sci Tech Health Background Briefings Medical notes Education Entertainment Talking Point In Depth AudioVideo Prof John Jenkins Charles Shaar Murray "Mozart even helps people in a coma" real 28k Monday, 2 April, 2001, 08:46 GMT 09:46 UK Mozart 'can cut epilepsy' Epileptic seizures happen in small areas of the brain Music, particularly Mozart, could have a therapeutic effect on epilepsy, say scientists. Short bursts of Mozart's Sonata K448 have been found to decrease epileptic attacks. Listening to Mozart could just hold some hope in the treatment of epilepsy Professor John Jenkins, University of London There are now calls for more research to be done to see whether other music has such a positive effect on the brain. Professor John Jenkins, who has reviewed the international research on music therapy, said it was very probable that work by other musicians could also trigger the "Mozart Effect." He told the BBC that Mozart and also Bach have similar structures. Patients who had been exposed to 10 minutes of the music were then tested and just 10 minutes exposure improved their spatial skills, such as paper cutting and folding. Studies on rats showed that those that had listened to the K448 sonata were able to negotiate a maze faster than those that had been played minimalist music or left in silence. Spatial tests In other tests, children who were taught a keyboard instrument for six months, learning simple melodies, including Mozart, did better on tests than children who had spent their time working with computers. Although other scientists were unable to reproduce these results, Professor Jenkins, of the University of London, said he believed they had merit and that the positive effects on epilepsy were particularly encouraging. He said: "There is enough in it to justify further work being done. I thought there was enough in it to justify longer term exposure. "Listening to Mozart could just hold some hope in the treatment of epilepsy." Scans have shown that the human brain uses a wide distribution of areas to listen to music. Further research The left side of the brain tends to process rhythm and pitch and the right looks after timbre and melody. Professor Jenkins said that listening to music would prime the relevant areas of the brain. But he stressed that for the music therapy to be of any real use for epileptics, there would need to be much more research on the "Mozart Effect". The Performing Right Society (PRS) has launched its own study into the powerful and often hidden effects of music - The Power of Music. Andrew Potter, chair of the PRS, said: "There has always been anecdotal evidence of other benefits deriving from music and here is a study which brings that evidence together from its original authoritative sources to help music organisations of all kinds provide cogent answers." Search BBC News Online Advanced search options BBC RADIO NEWS BBC ONE TV NEWS WORLD NEWS SUMMARY BBC NEWS 24 BULLETIN PROGRAMMES GUIDE See also: 08 Mar 01|Health Genetic clues to musical ability 25 Dec 00|Health Dementia 'affects musical taste' 16 Nov 00|Health Music therapy 'helps dementia' 07 Aug 00|Health Scans uncover 'music of the mind' 15 Mar 01|Health Rubbing clue to epilepsy Internet links: The Power of Music Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine library The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites Top Health stories now: Postcode lottery in GP services IVF mix-up heads for court Transplant first for cancer patient Costly wait with dementia symptoms Chicken checked for BSE New hope for Aids vaccine Campaign to end stigma of mental illness Parents to sue over epilepsy row Links to more Health stories are at the foot of the page. E-mail this story to a friend Links to more Health stories In This Section Postcode lottery in GP services IVF mix-up heads for court Transplant first for cancer patient Costly wait with dementia symptoms Chicken checked for BSE New hope for Aids vaccine Campaign to end stigma of mental illness Parents to sue over epilepsy row Survey shows cancer 'gap' Pesticides 'threat to rural dwellers' Margaret Cook blasts 'NHS meddling' Kenya hit by malaria epidemic Dogs in poison bug frame New powers call for donor cards QA: IVF 'mix-up' QA: Legal minefield of IVF 'mistake' IVF under the microscope QA: Aids vaccine Analysis: The changing face of Aids Device could detect overdose drugs Facing up to life with HIV Breast advert 'unfit for the young' US plans mass smallpox vaccination Warning on condom safety ^^ Back to top News Front Page | World | UK | UK Politics | Business | Sci Tech | Health | Education | Entertainment | Talking Point | In Depth | AudioVideo ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To BBC Sport | To BBC Weather ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MMIII | News Sources | Privacy
Why elephants don't forgetA study of African elephants reveals that dominant females build up a social memory as they get older, helping the herd to survive.
BBC News | SCI TECH | Why elephants don't forget low graphics version | feedback | help You are in: Sci Tech Front Page World UK UK Politics Business Sci Tech Health Education Entertainment Talking Point In Depth AudioVideo The BBC's science correspondent Sue Nelson "Crucial in deciding between friend or foe" real 56k Thursday, 19 April, 2001, 18:01 GMT 19:01 UK Why elephants don't forget Older female elephants have a 'social memory' By BBC News Online's Helen Briggs The saying that elephants never forget has been backed by science. And it seems that the old adage may be particularly true in the case of matriarchs, who lead the herd. Elephants can certainly build up a memory over the years and hold on to it Karen McComb, animal communication expert A study of wild African elephants has revealed that dominant females build up a social memory as they get older, enabling them to recognise "friendly" faces. They signal whether an outsider is a friend or foe to the rest of the herd, allowing family members to focus on feeding and breeding when there is no danger. Knowledge The older and more experienced the matriarch, the better she is at recognising old friends, and the more calves the family is likely to produce. Poaching the matriarch could affect the survival chances of the whole herd The findings have important implications for conservation - poachers tend to kill the bigger, older elephants, thereby decreasing the survival chances of the whole group. "Elephants can certainly build up a memory over the years and hold on to it," study team leader Dr Karen McComb, of Sussex University, Brighton, UK, told BBC News Online. "The matriarch plays a key role, because she has time to build up a social knowledge, the others depend on her." Elephants often travel large distances in search of food. A typical group of elephants consists of a matriarch grandmother and a number of her daughters and granddaughters. Impact Male African elephants leave the family units at an early age and remain single or in small bachelor groups. When the female elephants encounter other individuals they do not recognise, family members bunch together defensively to protect their young. The scientists found that older matriarchs were better at picking out genuine strangers by means of the elephants' smell or contact calls, allowing the herd to spend more time relaxing and breeding. McComb and colleagues studied 21 elephant families in Amboseli National park, Kenya, over the course of seven years. They believe that anything which removes the grandmother from the family, such as poaching, or a possible lifting of the international ban on the ivory trade, would have a significant effect on reproduction. The research is published in the journal Science. Search BBC News Online Advanced search options BBC RADIO NEWS BBC ONE TV NEWS WORLD NEWS SUMMARY BBC NEWS 24 BULLETIN PROGRAMMES GUIDE See also: 08 Mar 01|Sci Tech Elephants eat their way to equilibrium 14 Mar 01|Sci Tech Dumbo 'needs big ears' Internet links: Science The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites Top Sci Tech stories now: Astronomy's next big thing Ancient rock points to life's origin Mobile spam on the rise Giant telescope project gets boost New hope for Aids vaccine Replace your mouse with your eye Device could detect overdose drugs Wireless internet arrives in China Links to more Sci Tech stories are at the foot of the page. E-mail this story to a friend Links to more Sci Tech stories In This Section Astronomy's next big thing Ancient rock points to life's origin Mobile spam on the rise Giant telescope project gets boost New hope for Aids vaccine Replace your mouse with your eye Device could detect overdose drugs Wireless internet arrives in China Chicago steals a lead on Silicon Valley Net body accused of bullying tactics Phones, tones and mobile music Skies open for UK astronomy QA: Astronomy super-club Artificial star enhances telescope's vision Perfect for washing and astronomy Russia plans to put people on Mars 'Windiest' farm goes live National park 'goes live' Fish policies 'ignore evolution' Europe tightens GM labelling rules Death knell for island hedgehogs Big eye on the sky Complex molecule surprises astronomers Fossil was 'first walker' ^^ Back to top News Front Page | World | UK | UK Politics | Business | Sci Tech | Health | Education | Entertainment | Talking Point | In Depth | AudioVideo ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To BBC Sport | To BBC Weather ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MMIII | News Sources | Privacy
To Love, Honour and DeceiveLong-term relationships are fundamentally dishonest. And it's all women's fault, new research suggests.
BBC News | SCI TECH | To love, honour and deceive low graphics version | feedback | help You are in: Sci Tech Front Page World UK UK Politics Business Sci Tech Health Education Entertainment Talking Point In Depth AudioVideo Professor Magnus Enquist "Species that are monogamous have a lot of sex" real 28k Anne Atkins, author "This research is male biased" real 28k Wednesday, 25 April, 2001, 18:44 GMT 19:44 UK To love, honour and deceive Long-term relationships are based on deception By BBC News Online correspondent Mark Ward Long-term relationships are fundamentally dishonest. And it's all the fault of females. Scientists claim that monogamous relationships among many species, including humans, only persist because females have found a way to disguise whether they are fertile. The researchers claim that by offering sex anytime, but no clues as to whether they will conceive, females trick males into hanging round for a long time. The evolution of this deception is the only reason that monogamy has developed. Sexual deception New Scientist reports that two zoologists claim to have uncovered the dishonest heart of every faithful relationship. Classical explanations of sexual behaviour always focus on the male. But this gives stronger focus on the woman Magnus Enquist Magnus Enquist of Stockholm University and colleague Miguel Girones from the Netherlands Institute of Ecology have been modelling the development of monogamous relationships and claim that the state only develops when females start deceiving males about their fertility. In many species, females often advertise their fertility with visual or chemical cues and, as a result, only suffer the amorous attentions of males when they are likely to conceive. They typically avoid too much sex because it takes energy and leaves them at the risk of contracting disease. This behaviour also helps males decide with whom to mate, and when they can move on and try to spread their genes elsewhere. Roguish behaviour In many other species, such as humans, birds and porcupines, females hide their fertility and so keep males hanging round on the off-chance that they will conceive. This deception also discourages males from seeking other mates because they are just as likely to be fertile as the female the male has shacked up with claims Magnus Enquist. The pair tested their theory in a mathematical model and found that males only stopped their roguish bachelor lifestyle when females start hiding their fertility. "Classical explanations of sexual behaviour always focus on the male," Magnus Enquist told New Scientist. "But this gives stronger focus on the woman." Search BBC News Online Advanced search options BBC RADIO NEWS BBC ONE TV NEWS WORLD NEWS SUMMARY BBC NEWS 24 BULLETIN PROGRAMMES GUIDE See also: 25 Sep 98|Sci Tech Infidelity 'is natural' 21 Aug 99|UK 'I do': The thing to do 09 Sep 99|Europe Children to get marriage lessons 16 Mar 00|Education Sex education will emphasise marriage 23 Apr 01|Health Evolution link to teen pregnancy 18 Jan 01|Sci Tech Songbird shows how evolution works 23 Feb 01|UK Did the caveman teach us to queue? Internet links: New Scientist Magnus Enquist Netherlands Institute of Ecology The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites Top Sci Tech stories now: Astronomy's next big thing Ancient rock points to life's origin Mobile spam on the rise Giant telescope project gets boost New hope for Aids vaccine Replace your mouse with your eye Device could detect overdose drugs Wireless internet arrives in China Links to more Sci Tech stories are at the foot of the page. E-mail this story to a friend Links to more Sci Tech stories In This Section Astronomy's next big thing Ancient rock points to life's origin Mobile spam on the rise Giant telescope project gets boost New hope for Aids vaccine Replace your mouse with your eye Device could detect overdose drugs Wireless internet arrives in China Chicago steals a lead on Silicon Valley Net body accused of bullying tactics Phones, tones and mobile music Skies open for UK astronomy QA: Astronomy super-club Artificial star enhances telescope's vision Perfect for washing and astronomy Russia plans to put people on Mars 'Windiest' farm goes live National park 'goes live' Fish policies 'ignore evolution' Europe tightens GM labelling rules Death knell for island hedgehogs Big eye on the sky Complex molecule surprises astronomers Fossil was 'first walker' ^^ Back to top News Front Page | World | UK | UK Politics | Business | Sci Tech | Health | Education | Entertainment | Talking Point | In Depth | AudioVideo ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To BBC Sport | To BBC Weather ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MMIII | News Sources | Privacy
Perfect pitch may help babies speakUS researchers say everyone may be born with perfect pitch to help them learn the skills of language.
BBC NEWS | In Depth | San Francisco | Perfect pitch may help babies speak CATEGORIES TV RADIO COMMUNICATE WHEREILIVE INDEX SEARCH You are in: In Depth: San Francisco News Front Page World UK England N Ireland Scotland Wales Politics Business Entertainment Science Nature Technology Health Education ------------- Talking Point ------------- Country Profiles In Depth ------------- Programmes ------------- SERVICES Daily E-mail News Ticker Mobile PDAs ------------- Text Only Feedback Help EDITIONS Change to World Tuesday, 20 February, 2001, 09:18 GMT Perfect pitch may help babies speak Babies are better than adults at recognising notes By Jonathan Amos in San Francisco It is likely that everyone is born with perfect pitch and then loses it as they grow older, for the simple reason that we do not need such a refined sense of hearing to go about our daily lives. This theory has been put forward by psychologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, who think perfect, or absolute, pitch - the ability to precisely recognise musical notes - is what actually helps babies to learn to speak. Once this task is achieved, perfect pitch is lost - unless it is deliberately cultivated in some way, either by learning a musical instrument or by speaking a language that conveys subtle meaning with different tones. The Wisconsin-Madison team presented their research to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). 'Standard impulse' As part of their studies, the researchers played adults and eight-month-old babies long sequences of musical notes. They found that if they changed the sequence only slightly, the adults could not tell the difference - but the babies could. The babies were played musical notes The US team said they could tell this because it was well documented that babies got bored if they heard the same thing too often - their attentions strayed. The team called it the "standard impulse in infants": what's new is interesting, but what's familiar - or previously learned - is less engaging. In the experiments, Professor Jenny Saffran and colleagues found that if they played the babies a slightly new series of notes after repeating the old sequence a few times, the babies would recognise this and give the music their full attention again - proof that they had a precise grasp of what each tone sounded like. Professor Saffran told the AAAS meeting that the ability to precisely recognise tones helped babies when they were learning to speak. She said she had no idea why most people later lost the ability, which probably happened while they were still in childhood. Maintain the skill "My guess is because this ability isn't terribly useful," she speculated. "So, unless you're a musician, where remembering pitch could be effective, or learning a tonal language like Vietnamese or Chinese, where the pitches tell you something about the meaning of words, remembering the pitch of a word can be very distracting." Psychology professor Jenny Saffran: Perfect pitch theory With absolute pitch, it may be a case of use it or lose it. Professor Saffran said there were many studies indicating that people who learned musical instruments at a very young age had a higher incidence of absolute pitch. There were also studies showing a higher incidence among people who were blind, since the pitch of a moving car or a person's footsteps could provide important spatial cues. WATCH LISTEN ON THIS STORY Prof Jenny Saffran A focus on relative pitches helps us navigate better our environment Science festival news See also: 22 Feb 00|Washington 2000 Into a new millennium of science 26 Jan 99|Anaheim 99 America's festival of science Internet links: British Association Festival of Science 2000 (BBC) American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites Top San Francisco stories now: Synthetic virus nearing reality Perfect pitch may help babies speak 'Hungry' stars reveal planet presence Code crackers to settle differences Biotechnology in the front line Umbilical cords to repair brain damage Scientists demand 'fish parks' Kilimanjaro's white peak to disappear Links to more San Francisco stories are at the foot of the page. 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The Evolution of EthicsA theory concerning the integration of ethics and science using cybernetic theory as a logical foundation.
Evolutionary Ethics The Evolution of Ethics The Evolutionary Process Seminal Social Catalysts The Evolution of Reason Moving from Ethics to Cybernetics Cybernetic ethics Mathematical Concepts Models of Ethical Evolution Social engineering Further Reading Chapter print-out's Preface Foreword pdf print-out Notes Clarifications The Evolution of Ethics An Introduction to Cybernetic Ethics S. E. Bromberg 433,341hits to this site, 190,414 unique visitors Related Issues summarized here, followed by the book There are web links to other writers on evolution at the bottom of the page. The Evolution of Ethics attempts to construct a conceptual bridge between biology and human behavior by examining the cultural and biological feedback system that inspires the evolution of social rules. In theory, at the heart of developing ethical systems is a cybernetic process that arises between the interaction of biology and culture using the informational feedback between the two to further human adaptation and survival. 1 Ethics merges with science in cybernetic ethics. This book presents a credible theory of how the evolution of ethical systems can be linked to science and mathematics. Cybernetics in this context means informational feedback in dynamic systems that sustains or redirects a behavior. Cybernetics is an important building block of biological adaptation and a prior condition to its existence. 2. When the subject of ethics arises, reasonable people often ask, "Who is to say what is right or wrong?" When ethical development is viewed as a science, it is not so much who's to say an action is morally right or wrong, but rather "what is to say an action is right or wrong," defined by inherent limitations of the physical and psychological worlds that make it impractical or imprudent to pursue certain behaviors, attitudes, or methods of reasoning regarding personal circumstances. Some of these limitations are illustrated in the evolution of traffic laws, street signs and stop lights which show how a system of law which came into being to minimize pain, suffering and death and to maximize societal efficiency, harmony and prosperity. 3. One of the oldest problems of philosophy is solved when looking at ethics in a scientific perspective. Philosophy concerns itself with search for the underlying principles of all that is seen and known in the world. These underlying principles are called first principles. But, how can there be first principles of ethics when morality is observably relative to time and place. Cybernetic ethics resolves this conflict. Cybernetics is focused on any informational feedback present in a dynamic system. Some examples of dynamic systems might be an economic system, a social system, educational system or an interpersonal relationship. In these types of systems for every action there can be a consequent reaction. The work place is a system. If a worker shows up to work late they can inspire the wrath of their boss. The consequent anger the boss expresses can be seen as informational feedback communicating the idea that the worker has done something wrong. The notion of right and wrong, thus, evolves from the consequences of actions, whether this occurs over centuries of time or in a day. The book uses the evolution of traffic laws to illustrate how informational feedback from the hazards of driving an automobile shapes the evolution of traffic rules. 4. Morality and ethics extends to the study of all types of "rule systems." Legal codes, customs, etiquette all evolve to address specific problems that can disrupt the peace, prosperity and productivity of a society. Morality is defined here as codes of conduct that find their source in human emotions and experience. Ethics is viewed as codes of conduct that evolve formally from logic, reason, and professional experience. In the past few centuries logic has left ethics in a state of confusion as its source and meaning. Evolution is not a logical approach to understanding ethics rather it is a reasonable way to understand ethics. Simply because philosophers have a high regard for their logic does not necessarily mean their logic is reasonable or accurate.. 5. There is long-standing belief that all moral knowledge is inherent in the words of a language. This idea is reflected in the "is-ought dichotomy" of David Hume and the "naturalistic fallacy" of G. E. Moore. This thinking leads to the belief that human experience does not play an important role in the development of ethical language. For example, if millions of people are injured or killed by the excesses of drinking alcohol and driving an automobile one cannot reason by the formal logics of Hume and Moore that one "ought not" drink and drive. This because formal ethical reasoning stresses an analysis of the language, and not scientific facts or experience. In meta-ethical thinking, drinking while driving is neither right nor wrong. One can only wonder by this logic how intoxication ever became a moral issue. 6. What is logical is not always reasonable in the world of experience. Meta-ethics significantly dominates formal ethical study, yet for the last two thousand years it has inspired little insight into the nature of morality. Meta-ethics has a polemical aspect to it in which it never quite answers anything while raising a whole host of new questions in the process that cannot be resolved. To some extent, the logics of formal ethics have built a "house of cards." As evolutionary science expands and becomes a more credible way to reason ethics and biology, the more pressure evolutionary science puts on these unstable philosophical reasoning's This theoretically leads to what has long been thought possiblea major paradigm shift in philosophical thinking. link to: the distinction between logic and reason in evolutionary theory 7. Cybernetic ethics does not necessarily clash with religious belief. For example, adultery to a religious person might seem "wrong" because it goes against the command of God. On the other hand, adultery might also be reasoned to be "wrong" by a moral scientist in a secular way. A scientist might draw their conclusions from the science of conflict analysis. Such an analysis probably would spell out, in an understandable terms, how adultery violates the law of efficient action and therefore should be discouraged as generative human behavior. This is because human social systems must also be stable systems to survive in the long-term, therefore, efficient action is an important factor in deciding human conduct. The scientist and the religious believer do have common interests. link to stable systems. 8. In conventional sociobiology (such as that of Michael Ruse and E. O. Wilson), an important "moral referent" is altruism. Altruism is the integrative term that joins their theory of ethics to biology. However, this approach is a cumbersome and impractical way to reason an ethical system. It can work, but it raises more questions than it answers. On the other hand, the moral referent in cybernetic ethics is a mathematically based cybernetic process. This is a more solidly scientific approach to reasoning ethical evolution. Link to altruism 9. Morality can be described in terms of static or dynamic systems, and stable and unstable systems. The dynamics of morality involve behavior. When morality is described in dynamic terms of cybernetics, it becomes a calculus that reduces the enormous complexity of morality to simpler terms. Calculus did for engineering what cybernetics will do for ethical analysis. Moral science, thus becomes social engineering. For instance, a large building has constantly shifting loads requires calculus to pin down exactly how much pressure is on a beam at any given moment. A structural engineer calls this load calculation its "moment" Likewise, a moral scientist might determine the "ethical moment" of a given action or behavior. The language of conventional morality is too simple to deal with complex and ever changing moral conditions. Notes on the scientific search for morality 7. The foundation of ethical evolution can be shown to rest on reason rather than relativity. Human morality, and the ethical systems it gives rise to, are to some extent relative to time and place. However, there are deeper forces at work in ethical evolution than relativity. When the evolution of ethical systems becomes centered on cybernetic science it becomes easier to understand how first principles of ethics and moral and cultural relativity can coexist. Notes on relativism first principles 8. There has been considerable debate concerning the existence of an objective foundation of reason or fact supporting a theory of evolutionary ethics. In cybernetic ethics the visible existence of social feedback supports the idea that there is an objective foundation. Human beings are part of a larger biological system that like most systems seeks a high level of systemic efficiency in order to promote its survival. The evolution of laws and morals evidences the hand of efficiency at work sustaining the human race. The foundation of ethics is not some static entity or idea, rather it is a dynamic and changing phenomena. The answer to why there exists a compulsion to survive is not important in constructing a theory of ethics based on survival. The fact is that people prioritize their values consistently and over centuries of time along the lines of minimizing pain, suffering and death and maximizing peace, prosperity, and productivity, which evidences the cardinal value of survival guiding the destiny of human endeavor. defining survival 9. There is a method to the emergence to morals that revolves around making choices. Some choices are discernibly better than others. In physics there is the Heisenberg Principle that notes that you can measure the speed of an electron but not its mass; or its mass, and not its speed at the same time. Making ethical choices is much the same thing because there are situations where a person cannot have it both ways. You cannot drive at high speed through crowded city traffic and be safe at the same time. You can have one but not the other. Thus, we see the emergence of moral sentiments that prescribe what you ought to do based on this observable principle. Questions to ask your ethics professor click here version 9.3 October 22, 2005 Chapters 1-4 present an easy to read theory of ethical evolution. (The Book) Preface to the Evolution of Ethics This book develops the idea that there is a rational basis for the existence of ethics. Such an approach is daunting because the idea of reason or rational causes at work in the formation of ethics has been seriously challenged since the eighteenth century Enlightenment. However, there have been developments in biology and cybernetics that lead to a comprehensive theory of morality in which the rational nature of ethics can more easily be explained. Not only can the rise of ethical systems be linked to biological concepts, but ethics can be tied to mathematical concepts as well by way of cybernetic science. When ethics and cybernetics are combined, the resulting theory turns on scientific principles instead of philosophical speculations. There are several important ideas linked to the emergence of ethical systems: first, that ethical systems evolve in response to the human need to survive in an environment where they are competing with many other organisms for scarce resources; second, that humans survive and flourish by efficiently using their resources and energies; and third, that the evolution of ethical systems is a function of an ongoing cybernetic process involving all humans, animals, and organisms. Human experiences accumulate as a reservoir of knowledge, which influences the societal perception of which behaviors benefit people and which act counterproductive to their health and welfare. When people deviate from behaviors that are known to be productive, feedback arises that affects their lives in both subtle and obvious ways. Thus, the way in which people write laws and attach moral significance to certain behaviors is linked to a cybernetic process that maximizes human survival, minimizes social conflicts, and increases the meaningfulness of the human experience. Feedback that inspires change enhances the human ability to survive and to compete with other animals and organisms. This is important in the sense that some biologists believe that ninety-nine percent of all species that have ever existed are now extinct. In order to build a bridge between the biological world of organic struggles for survival and the moral world of right and wrong, a simplified explanation of the evolutionary process is presented. This is necessary to illustrate how survival inspires a cybernetic process leading to the rise of ethical systems. The resulting theory sounds similar to some of the ideas of Thomas Hobbes. Where the two systems differ greatly is that the evolution of ethical systems here is viewed as an extension of a biological process, grounded in cybernetic principles, whereas Hobbesian philosophy derives from traditional ethical thinking touching on linguistic and metaethical aspects of reasoning. What is important to note is how conflicts and potential conflicts act as a form of cybernetic feedback to society that alerts people to make changes in the way they behave. Feedback is an essential ingredient in evolutionary growth. Traffic laws vividly illustrate how the forces of human survival and the need for the synchronization of many parts work. While the ideas of individual philosophers are not discussed directly, their relevance is implicit in the writing. Biological perspectives likewise do not address biological theory directly on a technical level. Books such as Living Systems, by James Grier Miller; The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins; and Mankind Evolving, by Theodosius Dobzhansky are more appropriate sources, in a field of many good books, for understanding biological phenomena. These three books illuminate the complexity of biological systems in a way that ultimately leads to ethical questions. For instance, the idea of incorporating the notion of organization and efficiency in ethical theory has its analog in Miller's living systems theory. Here it seems evident that successful organic strategies for survival have created extremely complex and efficient hierarchies of order in nature. The principles governing the evolution and survival of lower organisms seem much the same as the forces driving the development of moral systems. Living systems theory invites the question that if organic systems are so incredibly diverse and complex, why would the nature of moral systems be any different, suggesting that philosophical conundrums of the past regarding the nature of morality stem from underestimating the complexity of moral science. In Richard Dawkins' writings there are illustrations of how pervasive the struggle for survival is. Such struggle involves not only humans but lower organisms, all competing with each other for scarce resources. Dawkins' ideas are important in realizing that humans, after all, still act involuntarily on a biological level. Like it or not, struggles manifest in elegant and concealed forms have endured and proliferated to this day in human societies. Both Miller's and Dawkins' writings lend visual texture to the sense of complex systems uniting in cooperative strategies to further their mutual survival. The rise of ethical systems in this sense is a cooperative effort of humanity that has the effect of optimizing its energies and resources in an ever increasing dynamic of survival guided by cybernetic principles. Dobzhansky's work is crucial to understanding how human beings adapt to a hostile environment by changing the way their cultures are structured. The idea that human culture is an instrument of biological adaptation is central to perceiving how Dobzhansky, and those who followed him, were perhaps unknowingly the first to establish credible bridge points linking ethics with biology. Foreword The Evolution of Ethics attempts to construct a conceptual bridge between biology and human behavior by examining the cultural and biological feedback system that inspires the evolution of social rules. In theory, at the heart of developing ethical systems is a cybernetic process that arises between the interaction of biology and culture using the informational feedback between the two to further human adaptation and survival. Living systems of all descriptions have evolved both cooperatively and competitively for more than a billion years. Since biological systems have been intertwined for so long, a change in one system can cause a change in many others. In theory, these changes disperse through the environment like waves generated by an object hitting the surface of a quiet pond. Biological interrelatedness extends to human social systems as well, thereby imposing limits upon what people can reasonably do. Human beings are not at liberty to do as they wish because personal actions often inspire consequent reactions and sometimes overreactions that need regulating by way of laws and morals. This regulation affects individuals as well as large groups. An example of this might be seen in the careless use of fluorocarbons that thin the ozone layer, allowing harmful radiation to reach the earth and threaten the survival of all humans and organisms. Such a dangerous situation forces humans to choose between doing what they freely wish to do (risking pain, suffering, and death in the process) or setting limits on their behavior. The demonstrable effects of pollutants on people appears to force the formation of laws and enlightened moral attitudes that discourage the practice of releasing dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere. These kinds of laws cannot be said to have emerged from some abstract philosophical theory of right and wrong. Instead, they appear to have evolved from real life situations in which human beings are forced to adapt to threatening circumstances in order to maintain their health and quality of life. Morality is sometimes viewed in a negative context because it is associated with self-serving political and religious causes. In spite of this fact, the imposition of rules in the main does not lower the quality of human life. To the contrary, carefully laid out rules have the greater potential to improve its quality. Broadly imposing guidelines through the promotion of statutory laws as well as moral, manner, and customary rule systems, redirects social priorities in an efficient way. In turn, there is an increase in societal organization and efficiency that enhances cultural peace, prosperity, and productivity. Social evolution in this light acts as an extension of the same biological processes observed in lower organisms where it appears that tight hierarchical organization and efficient survival strategies further the life of many types of organisms. In theory, nature provides human beings with the means to motivate themselves and create great things by giving them passion and sensitivity. At the same time, it appears to endow them with an extraordinary intelligence to limit the excesses of their emotions. Unfortunately, while people strive to be rational, their actions are still governed by strong emotions. When they respond to emotions that are a derivative of physiology, behavioral excesses inspiring a host of problems manifest themselves. When emotions run high, there needs to be some mechanism present to keep passions from getting out of hand and causing harm to people or the societies they have spent so many years building. In much the same way that circuit breakers in a house prevent an overloaded circuit from melting the wires and causing a fire, moral restraints naturally arise and intervene as reasons (or a reason) to break up the vicious circles of conflict that passions can produce. The emergence of moral laws and sentiments, shaping the course of history, is therefore an extension of human physiology that stabilizes relationships so that people grow and prosper instead of conflicting to the point of extinction. Go to chapter 1 click here Links to other evolutionary web sites Darwin on the Evolution of Morality, Soshichi Uchii, Kyoto University (It's in english so you do not need to install language pack) Book Review. The Resurgence of Evolutionary Ethics. An excellent summary of the major issues in evolutionary ethics by Richard Weikart. Click Here Evolution and Ethics: An Idea Whose Time Has Come? Part 1 Evolution and Ethics: An Idea Whose Time Has Come? Part 2 Here is one of the better evolutionary ethics web sites. Dr. Corning presents an insightful and knowledgeable summary of important ideas concerning evolutionary ethics from the time of ancient Greece to the present. The arguments are very precise, abstracted and presented with few words, however his approach is unique and notable. This analysis was written in the course of reviewing the essays of other evolutionary ethics writers. (Part I) Peter A. Corning, Ph.D. Institute for the Study of Complex Systems. biographical info The History of Cybernetics. The American Society for Cybernetics This site is highly recommended http: www.asc-cybernetics.org foundations history.htm Early theories of ethics and cybernetics: Cybernetics Human Knowing , from A Journal of Second Order Cybernetics Cyber-Semiotics The Biological Basis of Morality by Edward..O. Wilson This link is an interesting philosophical synopsis of biology and morality. click here Professor Wilson hypotheses that scientifically breaking down the moral sentiments might lead to a more scientific knowledge of morality. To the contrary, in cybernetic ethics the linkage to science is not an analysis of the sentiments rather an analysis of a cybernetic process. The following quote from the Atlantic Monthly. Little wonder, then, that ethics is the most publicly contested of all philosophical enterprises. Or that political science, which at its foundation is primarily the study of applied ethics, is so frequently problematic. Neither is informed by anything that would be recognizable as authentic theory in the natural sciences. Both ethics and political science lack a foundation of verifiable knowledge of human nature sufficient to produce cause-and-effect predictions and sound judgments based on them. Surely closer attention must be paid to the deep springs of ethical behavior. The greatest void in knowledge for such a venture is the biology of moral sentiments. In time this subject can be understood, I believe, by paying attention to the following topics: * The definition of moral sentiments, first by precise descriptions from experimental psychology and then by analysis of the underlying neural and endocrine responses. * The genetics of moral sentiments, most easily approached through measurements of the heritability of the psychological and physiological processes of ethical behavior, and eventually, with difficulty, through identification of the prescribing genes. * The development of moral sentiments as products of the interactions of genes and the environment. Research is most effective when conducted at two levels: the histories of ethical systems as part of the emergence of different cultures, and the cognitive development of individuals living in a variety of cultures. Such investigations are already well along in anthropology and psychology. In the future they will be augmented by contributions from biology. * The deep history of moral sentiments -- why they exist in the first place. Presumably they contributed to survival and reproductive success during the long periods of prehistoric time in which they genetically evolved. From a convergence of these several approaches the true origin and meaning of ethical behavior may come into focus. If so, a more certain measure can then be taken of the strength and flexibility of the epigenetic rules composing the various moral sentiments. From that knowledge it should be possible to adapt ancient moral sentiments more wisely to the swiftly changing conditions of modern life into which, willy-nilly and largely in ignorance, we have plunged. It would seem that Wilson's sociobiology would be the definitive work touching on biology and ethics had he incorporated cybernetics. His sociobiology is so close to being the great work that it is. Click here for Wilson's article Also, comments on Wilson's sociobiology and ethics Biology as a Moral Guide by Eric J. Winter, including E.O. Wilson's observations. click here Link to Michael Ruse (Quote from the link) "It is indeed true that you cannot deduce moral claims (about) origins). However, using factual claims about origins, you can give moral claims the only foundational claim they might possibly have." In cybernetic ethics, the science of cybernetics form a foundation from which you can deduce moral claims about origins. Certainly such an idea of moving from a factual "is" to a moral "ought" or "ought not" goes against conventional philosophy. But, conventional ethical reasoning has not yet come to understand the power of cybernetics to explain complex systems. Review click here Michael Ruse's recent book touching on evolution and morality click here Link to Biology and the Foundation of Ethics . Cambridge University Press. Cambridge. Maienschein, Jane Ruse, Michael (eds). There appears to be an impassable barrier between science and ethics. Herbert Dingle (1946) has stated that this barrier exists because science is based on absolute certainty, while ethics has no general basis at all. Science is also capable of advancement, where ethics is not because science can repair its mistakes through reason and experience. Ethics only collapses when its foundations are uprooted. Because of this inefficiency regarding the understanding of ethics it is necessary that we observe and study moral behavior from a scientific perspective. The understanding of ethics goes both ways though, in that morality needs to be looked at biologically and biologists need to explain their ethical views more philosophically. (link temporarily not working) Arguments against Michael Ruse Evolutionary Ethics: A Crack in the Foundation of Ethics? Evolution and Ethics The Evolution of Conscience, The Evolution of Moral Codes by C.D. Broad A Short History of Evolutionary Ethics and its Critic by Paul Lawrence Faber Evolution and Ethics by T. H. Huxley Evolution and Ethics by Sir Arthur Keith Evolution and Ethics by Edward Stein The Correlation Between Evolution and Ethics by Adam Barbhart Intervening in Evolution: Ethics and Actions by Paul R. Ehrlich Evolutionary Ethics and Biologically Supportable Morality by Michael Byron Doris Schroeder: Evolutionary Ethics. "The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy" Brief outline of the arguments from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Ethics and Evolution, MITECS abstracts Evolutionary Theory and the Foundation of Moral Principles by Bart Voorzanger Philosophy: Evolution and Ethics Problems in deriving an ethical system from science Peter Singer Ethics in the Age of Evolutionary Psychology Evolutionary ethics: history critique ~ part I Evolutionary ethics: Ruse Sober ~ part II Evolution and Ethics The Great Debate: Philosophical Responses to Evolution Evolution Ethics, Huxley 1894 Monkey Morality, Gregory Koukl, derivation of the evolution of ethical systems The Ethical Aspects of Evolution Introduction to the Science of Ethics by Theodore De Laguna Evolution and Ethics Evolution and Ethics by Beth K. Lamont Intervening in Evolution: Ethics and Actions by Paul R. Ehrlich "The evolution of ethics appears to be a product of a complex brain that evolved for, among other things, dealing with other smart individuals living in the same social groups. The roots of ethics seem to trace to the evolution of empathythe ability to imagine anothers viewpoint..." Evolutionary ethics: history critque part 1 Semantic and Structural Problems in Evolutionary Ethics by K.G.Ferguson The Evolution of Morality The Evolution of Morality From the Internet publication The Colossus. "Wilson's basic argument is that moral values confer an evolutionary benefit on the humans that subscribe to them; thus, certain ethical values propagate in the cultural sphere if they allow their adherents to propagate in the biological sphere ...Moral values are thus always rooted in biological imperativeoften in a non-zero-sum game that benefits all individuals in a group in exchange for restrictions on individual behavior." Darwin on the Evolution of Morality, Soshichi Uchii, Kyoto Universit y This and several of the following links found on Vivisimo.com a good academic search engine. Additional Soshichi , and Abstracts Sociobiology, Evolution, Genes and Morality by Raymond Bohlin Ph.D. The Evolution of Morality Chapter 1: The Origin of Personal Morality By Durant Drake The Evolution of Morality Chapter II: The Origin of social Morality The Evolution of Morality and Fairness Morals, More than Nice, They're Evolution Moral Psychology and Evolution How Morals Evolve byGregory Koukl. Monkey Morality: Can Evolution Explain Morality? Morals and Markets: An Evolutionary Account of the Modern World By Danial Friedman Can Evolution Explain Morality? John Kilcullen. "It seems pretty clear that an evolutionary explanation will not provide a foundation for morality." Evolutionary Dynamics http: www.ecomall.com activism gopi.htm http: www.newton.dep.anl.gov askasci bio99 bio99030.htm The Evolution of Morals by David DeGusta by David DeGusta HOW MORALS EVOLVE http: www.equip.org free DC753.htm Gregory Koukl Dr. Chris McDonald's Moral Theory Publications Evolutionary Ethics Resource and Reference Material The Philosophy of Biology: A selection of Readings by Tim Lewens Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics Links for Evolution and Philosophy The History of Evolution Links for Evolution and Philosophy Evolutionary Ethics: Biology as a Moral Guide By Eric J. Winter The Light of Reason: Evolutionary Psychology and Ethics The Naturalistic Fallacy Bruce Thompson on the naturalistic fallacy The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy An overview of evolutionary ethics including the naturalistic fallacy and the is ought dichotomy The Naturalistic Fallacy Paul Lawrence Faber Hume Moore "Resources in Ethics and Moral Philosophy The Naturalistic Fallacy: The Logic of its Refutation Comments on the Naturalistic Fallacy by Mortimer J. Adler Ph.D. Problems in deriving an ethical system from science Natural Ethical Facts: Evolution, Connectivism, and Moral Cognition by William D. Casebeer e On the Naturalistic Fallacy: A Conceptual Basis for Evolutionary Ethics by John Teehan, Hofstra University The authors contend that rather than being a constraint on evolutionary approaches to ethics, the Naturalistic Fallacy, so understood, clears the way, conceptually, for just such an approach. The Is-Ought Dichotomy The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy The is ought dichotomy The is-ought Debate by Peter Singer Is Ought by Robert Bass The Nature of Language and Logic by Douglas Glen Whitman The is ought Problem by Gerhard Schurz Remembering the is-ought Distinction by Linda A Nicolosi Natural Ethical Facts: Evolution, Connectivism, and Moral Cognition by William D. Casebeer Naturalism Non-naturalism Moral Non-naturalism Naturalism.org Premises of Naturalism Ethical Non-Naturalism Naturalism Non-naturalism in Metaethics Paradigm Shift The Process of Paradigm Shift by Michael Ray Evolutionary Ethics: A Crack in the Foundation by John Mizzoni Definitions Good Open Question Argument Fact-value distinction Links to the definition and history of Cybernetics The History of Cybernetics. The American Society for Cybernetics. This site is highly recommended http: www.asc-cybernetics.org foundations history.htm A conventional definition of cybernetics Second-order definition of cybernetics including the mathematics of cybernetic systems. http: pespmc1.vub.ac.be Papers Cybernetics-EPST.pdf Definition from Principa Cybernetica Second-order cybernetics definition. Modern "second-order cybernetics" places emphasis on how the process of constructing models of the systems is influenced by those very systems, hence an elegant definition - "applied epistemology" . Ethics of Cybernetics by Kevin Warwick. A new definition. Cybernetics here is defined as "The study of the interaction between man, machine, and animals." Insert the name Kevin Warwick in the search box that appears to access this file. While the subject is not strictly on ethics this definition seems appropriate in the context of cybernetic ethics. Norbert Wiener the father of cybernetics What is Cybernetics? American Society for Cybernetics Cybernetics Behavioral Cybernetics Cybernetics and the Social Behavior Sciences by Gregory Bateson Cybernetics and behaviors, Judy Lombardi Behavior and Ethics Evolutionary Cybernetics Cybernetic Ethics was a term first used by Gregory Bateson. The Early Idea of Cybernetics and Ethics. Evolutionary Cybernetics, Principa Cybernetica Web Evolutionary systems and cybernetics Evolutionary Ethics: Principa Cybernetic Web Cybernetics and System Dynamics, Calresco Cybernetics Ecology Miscellaneous Cybernetics Norbert Wiener's Foundation of Computer Ethics by Terrell Ward Bynum "Cybernetics takes the view that the structure of the machine or of the organism is an index of the performance that may be expected from it." Gregory Bateson, the origin of the term Cybernetic Ethics Bacterial Cybernetics "Bacterial Wisdom: The general conclusion we draw from such examples, the implications to evolutionary theory and even the implications to philosophy, are presented in the paper Bacterial Wisdom, Gdel's Theorem and Creative Genomic Webs." Cybernetics and Human Knowing A Journal of Second Order Cybernetics Cyber-Semiotics Soziale Systeme Heinz von Foerster http: www.uni-bielefeld.de sozsys pdf glanville.pdf Cybernetics What? http: www.pangaro.com designsummit cultural cybernetics Social Engineering Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another by Philip Ball. An inspiring history of ideas searching for the mathematics of social order. Formal and Informal Fallacies Various fallacies Questionable cause fallacies Common argument fallacies Ethics and Mathematics Mathematics For Ethics Mathematics and philosophy Elegant nonsense in math similar to formalism in ethics "applied epistemology" . A Review of Ethics and Ethical Terminology Where do ethics come from? Paul R. Ehrlich Ethics: survey and observations an intro to evolutionary biology by Chris Colby. A fun, but not related theory: The Idle Theory of Evolution by Chris Davis Evolutionary Biology Introduction to Evolutionary Biology By Chris Colby Ethics Web Sites CalResco Ethics and Self-organizing systems Issues in evolution http: www.actionbioscience.org evolution index.html Christianity and Evolutionary Ethics: Sketch Toward a Reconciliation by Patricia A. Williams Teaching Darwin Seriously: Addressing Evolution and Ethics by Douglas Allchin The Origin of the Emotions by Benedict de Spinoza The Origin and Essence of Ethics: The Religious vs. the Universal, Sadek Jawad Sulaiman Problems with Ethics in an Evolutionary Materialistic World-View by Paul Gosselin. "Evolution provides the structured context of moral action: it has constituted human beings not only to be moved to act for the community good but also to approve, endorse, and encourage others to do so." Relativism, hedonism,, perfectionism Evolution, Behavior Genetics Evolution and Human Behavior Journal Evolution and Behavior Search Engines Behavior and the General Evolutionary Process by William M Baum Includes a discussion of informational feedback in genetic and biological systems. Altruism Altruistic is not the same as good. Biology Lurks Beneath: Bioliterary Explorations of the Individual versus Society By David P. Barash, Department of Psychology, University of Washington. Altruism In the news Visceral Morality (text link) Objective Morality by Robin Allot "...one can see why emotions were at the origin of the development of morality..." In Defense of a Dialectical Ethic Beyond Postmodern Morality by Mark Mason Here Visceral Morality conflicts with Ethical Formalism Moral Judgments by Peter B. Lloyd, University of Oxford Department for Continuing Education. A Critique of the Pragmatic Assigning of Monetary Values to Ecological Goods and Services by By Kate Farall This is a pdf. Look for the binocular icon in the upper right corner, click and enter the search term visceral morality. Here, evolutionary economics merges into evolutionary ethics. Philosophy and Ethics Web Sites Internet Ethics Library Philosophy sites Prof. Spalding's List of Morality, Ethics and Philosophy Research Resources Misc Assorted Index for Uchii's Online Articles Evolutionary Theories Ethics and evolutionary psychology Organizational Integrity, and how it relates to other practices of applied ethics Cultural Relativism by Kerby Anderson Game theory and Ethics Evolutionary Ethics and the Problems of Altruism by Russell A Jacobs. The Philosophy of Biology: A Selection of Readings by Tim Lewens Books on Evolution Evolution and Philosophy Evolutionary Ethics was contraversial in the 1940's as illustrated in the book From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany By Richard Weikart Review by Johannes L. Jacobse Another review at http: www.h-net.org reviews showrev.cgi?path=37981105462766 Evolutionary Origins of Morality Edited by Leonard D. Katz "The principal papers are summaries of large and complex bodies of work..." Elements of evolutionary ethics and politics: an analysis adhering strictly to Euclid's scheme of deduction and induction by Nubar, Zareh. St Catherine Press London, 1953. 100pp, Hardback Recent Cultural Evolution Publications EVOLUTION, COOPERATION ETHICS Good resource material as outlined by professor John Orbell in his coursework outline. Paste this URL in your browser http: www.hass.usu.edu ~apls syllabi orbell.html The Evolution of Ethics: An Introduction to Cybernetic Ethics Copyright 1995 Revised edition 1997-2005. Any portion of this web site may be reproduced by college and university professors or government agencies on eight and one-half by eleven sheets of Xerox paper in spiral or velo bound form only. Copyright must be acknowledged in copies and course readers that are intended for sale. Permission to resell in this book not required. This license to copy expires May 1, 2006. The Evolution of Ethics: An Introduction to Cybernetic Ethics Soft cover edition ISBN 0-9610450-0-0 $11.65. Notes:: evolutionary ethics, A theory of ethical evolution, A theory od genetics and ethics, Additions to the text by Sarah Bromberg April 18, 2004 at 12:48 PM Send this version out for editing. Check other links not part of the book for errors. The Evolution of Ethics The Evolution of Ethics The Evolutionary Process Seminal Social Catalysts The Evolution of Reason Moving from Ethics to Cybernetics Cybernetic ethics Mathematical Concepts Models of Ethical Evolution Social engineering Further Reading Preface Foreword pdf print-out Unedited Comments and definitions Visceral Knowledge Visceral Morality business ethics Updated 6 19 05 version 9.3 Once the study of ethics involves science, theoretical problems of the past such as solving the puzzle of first principles and relativity become easier to explain.
You've got a lot to answer for, Charlie DarwinIs psychology frozen in the Pleistocene era? Hilary and Steven Rose are sure it must have evolved since then.
Guardian Unlimited | Archive Search Go to: Guardian Unlimited home UK news World news Newsblog ---------------------- Archive search Arts Books EducationGuardian.co.uk Film Football Jobs MediaGuardian.co.uk Money The Observer Politics Science Shopping SocietyGuardian.co.uk Sport Talk Technology Travel Been there ---------------------- Audio Email services Special reports The Guardian The northerner The wrap ---------------------- Advertising guide Crossword Soulmates dating Headline service Syndication services Events offers Help contacts Feedback Information GNL press office Living our values Newsroom Notes Queries Reader Offers Style guide Travel offers TV listings Weather Web guides Working at GNL ---------------------- Guardian Weekly Money Observer Public Networkhome UKnews Worldlatest Books Money Film Society TheObserver Politics Education Shopping Work Football Jobs Media Search You've got a lot to answer for, Charlie Darwin Is psychology frozen in the Pleistocene era? Hilary and Steven Rose are sure it must have evolved since then Hilary and Steven Rose Guardian Thursday July 13, 2000 In the spring of last year, several contributors to our new book, Alas, Poor Darwin, hired a boat, appropriately called the Beagle, and took off round the Pacific islands Darwin made famous: the Galapagos. The richness and diversity of the plant, animal and bird life on these volcanic outcrops fascinated him, and he was later able to identify among his collection 12 distinct species of finches, each with slightly different beaks and feeding habits, from cactus eaters to insectivores. They must, he argued, have been derived from a common ancestor blown over from the mainland, and the different forms later diverged on their separate islands. Hence the evolution of species. On the boat we debated the mechanisms and processes involved, informed by modern studies of the changing distribution of beak sizes as finch populations responded to years of drought or downpour. Yet superb as such microevolutionary studies of Darwin's finches are, we chewed over how far they could cast light on major evolutionary transitions. The gap between evidence and theory on geological time scales is hard to bridge. Could the study of three decades of finch beaks inevitably lead to a theory of evolution as gradualist and continuous? How different such meticulous research was, we reflected, from the speculations of those self-styled Darwinians who have grouped themselves under the banner of evolutionary psychology (EP) and whose claims our book is intended to counter. EP's central thesis, stated in a score of popular books, newspaper articles and television spectaculars is that there is a "universal human nature" which "we" all recognise when "we" see it. That there is immense diversity as well as commonality in what another "we" sees is brushed to one side. This "nature", they argue, was established by evolution and natural selection during the Pleistocene epoch and has remained unchanged ever since, despite dramatic changes in the organisation of human society and lives - to say nothing of climate. But if birds' beaks can change within 30 years across a few generations, why not humans over the 100-600,000 years since the Pleistocene? Evolutionary psychology persists in misreading Darwin's central project, that was to explain the transmutation of species, and hence change over time. Its followers are preoccupied with stasis. There are, they say, universal mental "modules" for cheat detection, recognition and the sexual preferences of older men for younger women and young women for rich old men which persist as adaptations to the Pleistocene ecological niche - their so- called Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation. The fact that even their own texts report contradictory evidence - for example, research indicating that where women have independent access to resources, they no longer go for rich old men - does not dismay them. Here EP is much closer to Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism - the insistence on the natural "struggle red in tooth and claw" as providing an explanation of the social hierarchy of the Victorian Empire. Neither Spencer nor the EPers have change over time at the core of their theory. This omission ensures that EP fails to address the important task it sets itself. Take the claims that the expression of the emotions - of anger, happiness or misery - are the same the world over. Darwin's original evidence in his book The Expressions Of The Emotions In Animal And Man was based on his finding that photographs of ham actors expressing these emotions were accurately identified by many people in different countries. EPers build this speculation into a case of biologically fixed human universals. Potential facial manoeuvres are constrained by muscle, bone and nerve. So a smile is a smile is a smile - or is it merely an actor's rictus? What exactly is expressed by those photos in Hello! magazine of society beauties with their fixed smiles showing flawless teeth - but often ice-cold eyes? Genuine happiness? Posing for the photographer? The power of wealth? And what are the many meanings read into those smiles by us, the knowing viewers? These are not innocent expressions of pure biology, but the contruction of meaning out of the complexity of our biosocial existence. How about the poker faces of those who will not smile, or the sycophantic smiles of inferiors at superiors' jokes? And of course social scientists have been telling us for years about smiling as compulsory gender performance - notably by air stewardesses. Bringing gender analyses from the social sciences together with meticulous biological observation and experimentation is mutually enriching. Each discourse challenges and informs the other. As a sociologist and biologist living and working together we have enjoyed many hours of such debate. Yet this truly interdisciplinary research is precisely what EP denies in its insistence on the subordinate and colonised status of the social sciences. Both evolutionary theory and human psychology have been hijacked. Alas, Poor Darwin, the product of discussions between 15 philosophers, cultural critics, social scientists, ethologists and molecular biologists, is a step towards rescuing this interdisciplinary goal from the populist claims of biology as destiny. It will not get an easy ride, for EP is vociferous and well entrenched, and its claims are glib and attractive. Ultimately the only way to drive out bad theory is to replace it with better. This is the task we have set ourselves. Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology, ed. Hilary Steven Rose, is published by Cape. Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
Stone Age bosses aren't all that badApplied to business, as Nigel Nicholson does in his book Managing The Human Animal (Texere, 18.99), Evolutionary Psychology suggests that most organisational practice runs directly against the grain of human programming.
Guardian Unlimited | Archive Search Go to: Guardian Unlimited home UK news World news Newsblog ---------------------- Archive search Arts Books EducationGuardian.co.uk Film Football Jobs MediaGuardian.co.uk Money The Observer Politics Science Shopping SocietyGuardian.co.uk Sport Talk Technology Travel Been there ---------------------- Audio Email services Special reports The Guardian The northerner The wrap ---------------------- Advertising guide Crossword Soulmates dating Headline service Syndication services Events offers Help contacts Feedback Information GNL press office Living our values Newsroom Notes Queries Reader Offers Style guide Travel offers TV listings Weather Web guides Working at GNL ---------------------- Guardian Weekly Money Observer Public Networkhome UKnews Worldlatest Books Money Film Society TheObserver Politics Education Shopping Work Football Jobs Media Search Management Stone Age bosses aren't all that bad Evolutionary psychology suggests you go with basic instincts. By Simon Caulkin Work Unlimited Observer Sunday January 14, 2001 The knottiest problems in management are usually not to do with formulating strategy or carrying out routine operations (unless of course you are the railway industry). Time and again when managers are asked what causes them most grief, they reply that it is the most basic things of all: 'People' and 'change'. But here's a puzzle. Human beings are social animals. We are brilliantly equipped for appraising, interpreting and communicating with others. We are also wonderfully adaptable. We change and grow all our lives. We change homes, partners and governments. We swap fashions at the drop of a hat or hemline. But if that's the case - if people are naturally good at change and communicating - how come companies make such a hash of it? According to Nigel Nicholson, professor of organisational behaviour at London Business School, the answer (as to a number of other management paradoxes) is to be found in the emerging discipline of evolutionary psychology. Basically, EP marries the framework of Darwinism with modern theories of genetics and neuropsychology to propose that psychology as well as physique is the product of evolutionary winnowing. Applied to business, as Nicholson does in his book Managing The Human Animal (Texere, 18.99), EP suggests that most organisational practice runs directly against the grain of human program ming. Much of our behaviour is hardwired for the successful hunter-gatherer lifestyle of our prehistoric ancestors; and this 45,000-year-old psyche - putting emotion before rational analysis, vision before the other senses, narrative before more dispassionate forms of analysis - is understandably alienated among the chart boxes and serried hierarchies of the large modern organisation. 'You can take the manager out of the Stone Age, but not the Stone Age out of the manager,' as Nicholson puts it. Precisely because we are so adaptable, humans can seemingly put up with an awful lot. The changes that have led people from the outback to the urban jungles of New York or London, from small groups of hunter-gatherers to the teeming bureaucracy, have brought vast benefits in terms of productivity and the ability to support ever larger populations. But there's a cost. 'The further we get from our origins, the more the propensity for disorder grows,' says Nicholson. In society, that surfaces as social conflict, crime, mental illness and alienation. Business has its own version of these dysfunctions: the suppression of emotion and stress, disempowerment and alienation, low trust, management by fear, discrimination (the tyrannies of, respectively, rationality, bureaucracy, politics, dominance and tribalism). No wonder introducing change fails, or for that matter teams work fitfully if at all, or most decisions are just plain bad. Organisations take things that people do naturally - change, work together, make joint decisions - and make them do them unnaturally. One of the chief culprits here is rationality. Paradoxically, as an explanation and model of human behaviour, rationality is a fantasy. Despite the much-made comparisons with the computer, the brain isn't naturally equipped for it, being much more at home with fuzzy nonlinear approximations and intuitions than computational tasks such as statistical analysis or even simple arithmetic. This doesn't mean that rational systems are impossible or unnecessary. On the contrary, they are all the more essential to correct human biases and manage manmade complexities that are beyond the power of the brain to control. They are what makes the trains run on time (if you see what I mean) or prevent nuclear power stations from melting down (likewise). What is harmful, says Nicholson, is the dualism (mind body, reason emotion, nature nurture, humanity natural world) which makes humans believe that rationality untainted by emotion is the norm; that reason is undisputed king, instead of an equal partner in a human dialectic. The evolutionary psychology view of the world is controversial. It suggests that leaders may be born rather than made, that organisational gossip and politics are universal, and that gender differences make the male-constructed world of business inherently hostile for women. It is hard, admits Nicholson, for some groups to accept such conclusions. They are bad news, he says cheerfully, for consultants and other unreconstructed dualists, whose fundamental assumption is that nature is subservient to nurture (to put it crudely, any change can be accomplished by enough brainwashing). Bright young MBAs at the start of their careers, he notes, are particularly resistant to the notion of constraints to their wide-ranging ambitions, while CEOs and senior managers firmly reject the EP interpretation of executive pay as aggressive display, of hierarchies as a reflection of male preoccupation with status, and of many acquisitions as ego- and empire-building as much as rational strategy. Yet Nicholson is adamant that EP is the very opposite of a counsel of resignation or despair. For a start, the ideal organisation in EP terms (no surprises here) is exactly the one that most people would like to work in: small units, with a flexible hierarchy and leadership; working largely in team projects but recognising the individual; diverse, with high trust and high involvement; self-critical. Better, these attributes correspond quite closely to those of the 'high-performance workplace', which is emerging from the research as consis tently more productive, creative and profitable than less human-centred versions. Nicholson's favourite company is Semco, a Brazilian firm that has torn up the management handbooks and whose direction is almost entirely dependent on the motivation and ingenuity of employees. At a less exalted level, the new Darwinism offers a check against corporate decision-making. 'The history of post-agrarian civilisation has been largely a story of humans reacting with limited insight to changes they wittingly or unwittingly engineered,' Nicholson writes. 'We continue to be outpaced by our own inventions.' The antidote: manage the human animal. Deliberately use systems to support rational inadequacies. Build community. 'Know thyself,' says Nicholson. 'Only the system that knows itself has control over its destiny.' simon.caulkin@observer.co.uk Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
Has psychology become respectable at last?The past decade witnessed the surge of "evolutionary psychology". Its most thoughtful exponents, such as Robert Plomin, are confident that economics, education and sociology will all benefit from evolutionary psychology and gene mapping.
Guardian Unlimited | Archive Search Go to: Guardian Unlimited home UK news World news Newsblog ---------------------- Archive search Arts Books EducationGuardian.co.uk Film Football Jobs MediaGuardian.co.uk Money The Observer Politics Science Shopping SocietyGuardian.co.uk Sport Talk Technology Travel Been there ---------------------- Audio Email services Special reports The Guardian The northerner The wrap ---------------------- Advertising guide Crossword Soulmates dating Headline service Syndication services Events offers Help contacts Feedback Information GNL press office Living our values Newsroom Notes Queries Reader Offers Style guide Travel offers TV listings Weather Web guides Working at GNL ---------------------- Guardian Weekly Money Observer Public Networkhome UKnews Worldlatest Books Money Film Society TheObserver Politics Education Shopping Work Football Jobs Media Search "If you want to know the obvious, ask a psychologist." Has psychology become respectable at last? Lynne Segal Guardian Tuesday March 13, 2001 Before the meteoric rise of cultural studies in the 80s made it a sitting duck for academic satirists such as Laurie Taylor, psychology was a favourite target: "If you want to know the obvious, ask a psychologist." Taylor had primary source material, launching his own career as a psychologist four decades ago with "a nonsensical piece of research" on the correlation between eye-contact and interpersonal agreement. Measuring eye contact remains a staple of social psychology. Oxford psychologist Michael Argyle is prominent in the field: we tend to look more at people we like. Broadening his variables to include issues of key social concern, such as leisure, Argyle more recently discovered: "Involvement in sports usually begins in childhood when the main influences are parents and peers." One might well wonder whether little has changed in the 90 years since HG Wells snorted: "Psychology has given the world little cause for amazement." If so, we have cause for amazement at its quite extraordinary success. Psychology continues to thrive. Students flock in. The media consults it and most practitioners believe, as The Psychologist this month announces: "By definition we have primary importance for the well-being of society." There are fears, however, that its expansion may dissipate it into other domains - from cultural studies to neurology. Too little change? Extraordinary growth? Fragmentation? All true. But how should we assess these prolific pronouncements on human behaviour? In the past 40 years psychology has made repeated attempts to enrich the impoverished legacy of behaviourism's erasure of mental states and cultural contexts. But most have foundered on the computational fixations and mechanistic metaphors deemed necessary for simulating the familiar routines of Euclidean physics or molecular biology. The stimulus and response patterns of hapless laboratory "rats" were finally construed as conceptually inadequate for elucidating human thought and action with the "cognitive turn" of the 60s. Jerome Bruner, one of its pioneers, was, however, soon lamenting that this "revolution" had once again managed to eviscerate the essence of human experience in its fascination with universalising models of "information processing". O ur minds do not work like computers. What computers can do easily, we cannot do at all; what we can do easily, computers cannot do at all. To be human is to share capacities for conferring meaning on our bodily experiences and social interactions. Should we wish to gain understanding of the irrational in human existence, the conflicts and tensions in the psychological domain, we might want to survey the heritage of psychoanalysis. At its most sophisticated, it attempts to grasp something of the systematic ambiguities, evasions and deceptions in those stories we all tell ourselves. What will remain unique in individual activity is all the unknown ways in which our pasts contribute to the success, frustration or failures of our actions and our attempts to make sense of our lives. How the political enters the psychological arena is in the conventions that make some people far more readily affirmed as worthy subjects of their own self-productions; others barely able to escape the disparaging descriptions used to diminish them. In what is known as the "turn to language" in psychology in the 80s, some of these thoughts were developed by psychologists rejecting all-encompassing models of human behaviour for detailed, contextual analysis of the discourses we use to describe and justify our actions. It is this discursive turn that threatens the centre of the discipline. Although many remain committed to methods for positing universal axioms of behaviour, a minority distance themselves from this project. Disunity threatens other disciplines touching on human affairs, from history and economics to evolutionary genetics. (Indeed, it is some neurobiologists who most compellingly articulate the inevitable lack of fit between human history and natural evolution.) But the battle is fiercest in psychology. The past decade witnessed the surge of "evolutionary psychology". Its most thoughtful exponents, such as Robert Plomin, are confident that economics, education and sociology will all benefit from evolutionary psychology and gene mapping. But such talk is little more than distraction for other psychologists busy mapping subjectivity in its specific historical and cultural contexts. Yet, within this crossfire, an old problem returns: arduous empirical toil most often ends up revealing truisms. Dipping at random into the British Psychological Society conferences of 2000, I hit on this contrast. On the radical frontier of discourse theory, a brand new question: "The lesbian vagina: does it exist?" Detailed discursive data analysis of women's texts will enlighten me. "The 'lesbian vagina' as a unitary construct with fixed meanings does not exist." But then again, no meanings are fixed and unitary. My eyes fall on fresh data from ongoing eye-movement research: "If information is to be added to a report cover, distracting design features should be de-emphasized." The alliteration is soothing, the thought familiar. For all its diversities, when it comes to restatement of the blindingly obvious, psychology sometimes remains a little too fixed, a little too unitary. Lynne Segal is professor of psychology and gender studies at Birkbeck College. Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
Darwin's darlingA profile of Helena Cronin.
Guardian Unlimited | Archive Search Go to: Guardian Unlimited home UK news World news Newsblog ---------------------- Archive search Arts Books EducationGuardian.co.uk Film Football Jobs MediaGuardian.co.uk Money The Observer Politics Science Shopping SocietyGuardian.co.uk Sport Talk Technology Travel Been there ---------------------- Audio Email services Special reports The Guardian The northerner The wrap ---------------------- Advertising guide Crossword Soulmates dating Headline service Syndication services Events offers Help contacts Feedback Information GNL press office Living our values Newsroom Notes Queries Reader Offers Style guide Travel offers TV listings Weather Web guides Working at GNL ---------------------- Guardian Weekly Money Observer Public Networkhome UKnews Worldlatest Books Money Film Society TheObserver Politics Education Shopping Work Football Jobs Media Search The Guardian Profile: Helena Cronin Darwin's darling She's an evangelical evolutionist who runs an influential salon and courts controversy with her views on feminism and parenting. Anne Perkins on the philosopher who claims to have no ambition yet has ensured that her views are at the heart of British political debate Guardian Saturday August 28, 1999 She is the feminists' bete noir, the woman who argues that all women have certain pre-set programmes of behaviour, a kind of psychological default setting that disposes them to want a single mate whom they select for status before devoting themselves to rearing the inevitable offspring. Men, on the other hand, are disposed to have lots of mates, chosen for their looks, thus making female beauty a legitimate subject for scientific inquiry and lusting after page 3 totty nothing more than a natural expression of the biological quest for genetic advantage. Helena Cronin's crystal-clear vowel sounds can be heard somewhere on the airwaves most weeks at the moment, taking issue with feminists and evangelising for Darwinian theory in general and evolutionary psychology in particular. She is a ferocious debater, steely in her conviction that Darwin got it right. "I have enormous confidence in Darwinian science, what it's got to tell us about, for example, sex differences, enormous confidence about how a lot of standard feminist views about it are, therefore, wrong," she says in the kind of unswerving, unapologetic tones which reduced not just Germaine Greer but Melvyn Bragg too to bad-tempered frustration on one radio programme. Another feminist, Helen Wilkinson, had a brisk exchange of views with her last month on Wilkinson's ideas about the future of the family. "The frustrating thing is Cronin's fundamentalism. She's very naive. She doesn't seem aware of the consequences of her ideas, the way they are used by the right." Now, though, as the tide of interest in man-of-the-millennium Charles Darwin's theories of evolution surges ever upward, Cronin herself is pursuing those consequences. In the first attempt to take Darwinian theory into real policy making since the 60s (and since Charles Murray argued in The Bell Curve that black people were genetically less intelligent than whites and therefore positive discrimination was a waste of time), she and a colleague in March submitted a detailed response - which they're already reworking - to Supporting Families, the government's family policy green paper published at the beginning of this year. "Evolutionary psychology provides possibly the best opportunity yet for designing targeted, efficient and effective policies to shape human behaviour in the ways in which we desire," they write in the introduction, without even the smallest nod to the awful history of subverted Darwinism, of genetic determinism and theories of a master race. Unflinchingly, Cronin sets out the evolutionary stall for the millennium: on the significance of contraception, for example (the invention of which shows we don't just single-mindedly want to reproduce, however selfish our genes): "For the first time ever, women can go out and earn. They had always done the gathering, but they needed a male as well. Now they can do without." The problem - one of the problems - is that there aren't enough jobs. "For a man, status comes from material resources which come from a job. Without it, they turn to crime to get the resources. The past 20 years have completely overturned 10,000 years of society, of male:male competition for status, which had been powerfully reinforced by modern industrial society." And on parenting: "We're mammals. In any mammalian species you've got to recognise the relationship with the mother is going to be rather different from the father's. Males always have the option of walking out, women only have the option of infanticide or early abortion. We have certainty of maternity, they don't have certainty of paternity. Men are always potential non-investors. "It's not that there is no such thing as paternal love - manifestly there is - but that doesn't mean it's the same as maternal love. I'm not saying it's worse, or better, but it's different and anyone who says it isn't just doesn't understand what being a mammal is all about." Plainly, Cronin is not afraid of controversy. What she wants is the "right" answer. She likes Darwin's theories, because she is convinced they're "right". She says she was never comfortable with pure philosophy because there weren't enough right answers. Instead she turned to the philosophy of science. "There were genuine philosophical problems and there were solutions, and one could actually judge the solutions and tell whether you'd got the right one, or whether it was at least better than previous ones." A favourite Cronin test of the rightness of Darwin's arguments is their provability by someone from another planet, as in: "A Martian with no knowledge of the species could tell we reproduce sexually because there are clearly males and females ..." Talk to Cronin about her childhood and the factors which might have influenced her, and it is almost as if she too were a Martian, she is so oddly amnesiac about her family. She is prepared to reveal that she is the only daughter of Jewish parents. Her father was born here, but her mother arrived only as a small child in the 20s, wrapped in an aura of central European political persecution. By the time Helena was born in 1942, they were living in comfortable prosperity in Hampstead Garden Suburb. She talks of them fondly, but impersonally. "They were terribly modern. They had a book called The Child Is Always Right. There is a passage in Orwell somewhere where he describes sandal-wearing vegetarian socialists: my parents were a bit like that." Maybe it's because she sees herself as the daughter of 2m years of evolution rather than the product of a particular genetic union nurtured in 50s culture. As a child she was, according to a cousin, most remarkable for her stunning looks. By the time she went to Manchester University in the early 60s, it was not exceptional in her family to go on to higher education, but there had been an assumption that she would do the typical good Jewish daughter bit and marry very young. Her father was perplexed by the decision to read philosophy. "What job will she get with a philosophy degree?" he asked. She wasn't sure either. But: "I liked the idea of understanding logic, and knowing how to argue. I thought that was important because that's really the key to understanding things." Not that she enjoyed it. Only when she discovered the philosophy of science did she felt comfortable. That led her to a master's at the London School of Economics and to Darwin. "Wittgenstein said Darwinian theory had no interest for philosophers, and even in the 60s - even now - they turn up their noses at it, saying, 'it's not real science, it's a tautology because it's to do with the survival of the fittest, and how do you judge who is fittest of those who survive?'On the other hand, this was the foundation of the theory of modern biology, about all living things and indeed about any system in which you get apparent design without a designer. It's one of those theories likely to be right, always. "Einsteinian theory might very well one day be shown to be wrong, but biologists are very likely to be forever Darwinians so it seemed very odd to be a philosopher on the sidelines shouting it down." She doesn't say so, but Darwinian theory seems to shape even her view of her own past. Where many of her contemporaries would curse the male-dominated culture in which they grew up, she says: "I, being a girl, didn't have any ambitions whatever. I didn't want to do the extra year for Oxbridge entrance. My older brother went to Oxford, he just had that single-mindedness that males have, and that ability to apply himself." So it is unsurprising that she was sidetracked from a PhD to explore Darwinian theory further by domesticity and the life of a North London wife. She is married to a South African, Aubrey Sheiham, professor of epidemiology and public health at University College, London. On the other hand, she rejected motherhood. They decided not to have children. "When Aubrey suggested it, I was astonished. It had never occurred to me one could just decide not to have them, it was a startling idea." It is not, apparently, a decision she regrets, even though her cousin, Judy Oddy, describes her as a very loyal member of her extended family and "very good with children, very encouraging and admiring. They would have been super parents." Yet, if there is an evolved disposition among women to want babies in the same way they want a mate (no one has looked at it scientifically yet), Cronin, at this distance at least, found it easy to override. Women may be disposed to make a careful choice of mate, but babies, she thinks, are probably merely consequential. "Childcare is a very precious good, it's not something that's going to be given out indifferently, but it's possible that we have reproduced in just the way we have without a prior wish to have children." Without the untidiness and clutter of motherhood, Cronin has instead created a little island of minimalist perfection in London N7 - inspired garden outside and cool order inside. She matches it herself: all this can only be the product of a very orderly mind. A decade of drift seems most unlikely for the virago of the airwaves but she insists she has always been without ambition. She kept trying to give up philosophy, claims she was " egregiously bad" at it, and only carried on because at key moments when she was on the brink of changing direction someone came along and told her she was good at it and should stick with it. But by the end of the 70s (she can't quite remember when) she had had enough of pottering about and picked up her PhD again, just for the sake of neatness it seems, and the rest isn't yet, but may well become, history. It was a new dawn for Darwinian theory. There had been a resurgence of interest in the understanding of animal behaviour, and by the 80s there was growing interest in its potential for understanding the human mind. At the same time, Darwinian theory was finally regaining acceptance as a tool in other disciplines. Now there is evolutionary psychology, sociology, even economics. Cronin's interest was in its importance to philosophy. "If you think about epistemology - the theory of knowledge - it is really all about how humans can understand the world, and if we don't do that by the means that natural selection has given us, then you just don't begin to understand," she says. She turned her PhD thesis, which looks at the evolution of understanding of two Darwinian "problems" - sexual selection and altruism - into a successful and well-regarded book, The Ant And The Peacock, a history of Darwinian interpretation. Geoffrey Miller, an economist drawn into the Cronin salon, describes it as "a vital source book. Anyone who's interested has a copy on their shelves." None of this sounds particularly exceptional until you consider the context. Although biologists remained unblushingly Darwinian, the idea of applying evolutionary theory to other disciplines had become thoroughly discredited after it was picked up by late Victorian imperialists with an interest in ideas of a "master race", subsequently a justification for eugenics and the Final Solution, and an interpretation which lingered right through to support theories of racial superiority in post-war America. For almost all academics, it had become a pariah subject. For many, it still is. Ideas in sociology developed almost in opposition to Darwinian ideas about evolved behaviour, insisting that environment was, if not the only then certainly the dominant influence in any human life. The infant brain was a blank page, a tabula rasa , on which experience would write a set of responses which would accumulate into a character with skills like language, capable of emotions like love, as long as the opportunity for learning them was available. The science of the mind kept a very long arms' length from the science of the body. What Helena Cronin has done is provide a forum to bring them together. It all began with an international conference in 1993 at LSE. "I did it in my usual sleep- walking way, not realising it was groundbreaking. People from different disciplines met for the first time. Maybe because I had no training in any particular discipline, no loyalty to a history, I didn't see the problem. I still don't understand why people are so resistant, so fearful of genetic determinism and not of, say, environmental determinism." The conference, in the aftermath of the collapse of communism and with old belief systems in disarray, led the following year to a series of seminars, under the aegis of Darwin@LSE, an offshoot of the centre for philosophy and natural sciences. "Darwinian theory now promises to provide the first fully scientific insight into human nature - exploring our brains, minds, consciousness, bodies, behaviour and aspects of our culture as adaptations evolved by natural selection," the introduction to the first report said. In a series of seminars which fans say have had the impact of the salons of the Enlightenment, Cronin brought together celebrated biologists like Professor John Maynard Smith and Lewis Wolpert with geneticists like Steve Jones and pioneers of what was becoming known as evolutionary psychology, like the American Leda Cosmides. She coined the phrase in the first place to describe the work she and her husband John Tooby were doing to advance the theory that the mind, far from being an all-purpose computer responding impartially to the world around it, had, through natural selection, evolved to respond in a particular way to particular environmental circumstances. "Because of eugenics," says Professor Maynard Smith, "any notion of genetic influence had become completely unacceptable. Biologists stuck to biology and sociologists ignored genetics. We biologists ran away from the issue. The series of discussions and seminars really were very striking, I met a whole range of people I would never have met otherwise, and that wouldn't have happened without Helena. She does have a great gift for bringing people together." The then director of the LSE, John Ashworth, predicted at the time: "The application of evolutionary theory to the social sciences, many of which have never been able to do more than assume that the heritable component in what they were studying was small, unknowable and thus necessarily had to be neglected, will produce social sciences far different from any we can envisage now." The press loved the seminars and they loved the science. At last, science might explain why rich old men can take their pick of pretty young women (status, stoopid), and why there is a universal cross-cultural standard of feminine beauty, science that could be illustrated by pictures of naked women with "perfect" bodies, under headlines like "The Sexual Power of the Waistline". (Attractiveness, health and fecundity at a glance, according to another headline.) Even its supporters admit that there is a danger in the way the evolutionary psychology is sometimes used to provide ancestral functions for all human behaviour. This is accentuated when its gods, like Steven Pinker, write articles for mainstream publications on, for example, "an evolutionary explanation for presidents behaving badly". But there is also serious and less eye-catching work. Another contributor to the seminars, and Cronin fan, the eminent historical sociologist Lord Runciman, believes her success lies not only in bringing together different disciplines, but increasingly people from across the political spectrum, not only conservatives who believe Darwin supports the status quo. "This is not genetic determinism," he says. "The question is, if we are not genetically different, how, over 60,000 years, have we produced this cultural variety? How does the environment interact?" He adds: "It's the only game in town. It's a paradigm shift. I suddenly realise that a whole lot of people are now looking at the same data in a different way." The left is not convinced. Nor are all scientists. Where is the evidence, they demand, to back up some of the claims of historical origins of behaviour. Brains, after all, don't make fossils. It is impossible to prove or disprove some assertions. Sceptics ask whether all the theories add up to a coherent theory of the mind rather than a mechanistic description which overlooks the way individuals are clearly capable of modifying their behaviour. None of this though, shakes Cronin's confidence. She can sound, sometimes, like the keeper of the Holy Grail in her enthusiasm for her subject. "All political theories, all policy decisions, make assumptions about human nature," she told the Rationalist Press Association in June, "Human nature is our evolved nature, the evolved psychology of our species. And in the past decade or so, Darwinian theory has begun to reveal what that psychology is. We at last have within our grasp a fully scientific understanding of ourselves." So, we have not yet had time to adapt, the 6,000 or so years since we were hunter gatherers being the merest blink in 2 years of evolutionary time. But we are as, Runciman argues, flexible. We have hundreds of different cultures to prove it. Hence Cronin's conviction: "If we want to bring out desired policy outcomes, desired changes in behaviour, we have to understand our evolved psychology and then work out what aspects of our environment we need to change." Which is why she wants to contribute to contemporary policy debates like the government's current concern about young lone mothers and absent fathers. Darwinian theory can be made to explain the kind of behaviour the government wants to change so creepily neatly that the hairs on your neck stand on end. In the detail of the Cronin view of how the state can intervene to help support families, there is no acknowledgement of the way society and culture have worked to reinforce the way mothers and fathers behave, and overwhelming emphasis on the evolutionary predictability of their behaviour. She argues: "By overlooking possible sex differences in parenting, the government runs the risk of promoting an androgynous parenting 'role' that may not be attractive to either sex, or be perceived as attractive in a partner and hence may have little effect in shaping parenting behaviour. Teaching men to be back-up mothers - even if it were possible - may not be in the best interests of any member of the family." But when you suggest this analysis ignores all other factors, Cronin strongly denies that it's by design. She is merely trying to explain there are differences which need to be taken into account or you end up with the domestic equivalent of Stalinist forced collectivisation. "Just saying blithely that androgynous parenting roles are desirable is likely to produce models neither men nor women will be comfortable with." She accepts that if "equal" parenting, in terms of time and quality, is considered a desirable objective, (she sounds uncertain herself) it is perfectly achievable. "We can do pretty well anything with our society. There is no need to set limits. But you can never ever do it without a knowledge and understanding of evolved human behaviour." Taking this kind of argument on public outings is a high risk strategy. Even though thinkers on the right like Matt Ridley would endorse the sentiment, he questions its usefulness in formulating policy. "It is helpful for individuals to understand each other," he says, "but it doesn't necessarily lead to government action. Do you have a policy which reinforces a kind of behaviour, or redresses it or suppresses it? "Science nearly always gets into trouble when it's applied rather than used to understand [the world around us]. It's the same in social sciences. It's trying to apply an understanding of how human beings are to decide what social policy should be. It's jumping the gun and it'll come out wrong." Cronin acknowledges the dangers. As she points out, she belongs to the generation who grew up in the shadow of the Bomb. "I might well have a misunderstanding about how to apply Darwinian theory to policy because that's not science, that's an extra-scientific view of how you might use the science." But that is not the same as conceding the science could be faulty. "It might turn out that this latest model of how you understand human nature is wrong, but it seems to look as if it will turn out to be right, and it's certainly the best one we've got. Better than original sin, or saying that men and women are exactly the same." And if Darwin appeals instinctively and only to the right? "Fight the prejudice then. You don't say stop being Catholic or Jewish or whatever because people are prejudiced against you, do you?" And what about critics who say Darwinism is simply genetic determinism? "That assumes that ideas based on the tabula rasa view of the human mind, or the androgynous analysis of human behaviour, are in some way totally harmless and perfectly OK as a basis for social policy or education. Look at feminism, so desperately trying to explain standard sex differences as purely environmental when they have maintained themselves for thousands of years. They can't be purely environmental." Ah, feminism. Maybe the real challenge for Cronin, and for her gifts both as a populiser of philosophy and as a facilitator between different disciplines is to find an accommodation there. She says she's willing, that she wants to influence feminist arguments, as long as she can do it without compromising Darwinism. Feminist thinkers, like Helen Wilkinson, are interested too in finding common ground. "One is a feminist," Cronin says, sounding irresistably like the Queen, "in the same way one worries about any 'ism'- racism or species-ism - because people shouldn't be discriminated against on the basis of their sex." But what does she think feminism can achieve now? "I'm still working it out. One of the frustrations is that one can't turn to current feminist thinking for help because they continue to deny basic sex differences. "I don't think we understand yet what women want. It's very obvious what men are all about, but much less easy to know what women are about. They are the species as it existed before sexual selection drove men apart. Men have set up society, shaped the world we know. Women's lives are far less public and visible and understood. I would like to know much more about them." Darwin is now at the heart of the British political debate. Although the prime minister's favourite sociologist (and director of the LSE) Anthony Giddens is dead against Darwin's escape from the biology lab, the man in charge of rethinking social policy in the Downing Street policy unit, Geoff Mulgan, believes the evolutionists' ideas are so important he devoted a whole issue of the Demos quarterly to them when he ran the think tank. Feminists are increasingly frustrated by their inability to catch Tony Blair's attention. Perhaps making friends with Helena Cronin is the way to sneak under his guard. Life at a glance: Helena Cronin Born: July 2, 1942. Education: Henrietta Barnett School, north west London; Manchester University (BA hons philosophy); LSE (MSc econ, PhD). Married: 1966 Aubrey Sheiham. Position: Codirector of the centre for the philosophy of natural and social science, LSE; research associate in the zoology department, Oxford University. Publication: The Ant And The Peacock (CUP) 1991. Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
And Darwin created us all...As two of the world's great Darwinists prepare to debate whether science is killing the soul, Tim Radford asks if natural selection is the key to life, the universe, and everything.
Guardian Unlimited | Archive Search Go to: Guardian Unlimited home UK news World news Newsblog ---------------------- Archive search Arts Books EducationGuardian.co.uk Film Football Jobs MediaGuardian.co.uk Money The Observer Politics Science Shopping SocietyGuardian.co.uk Sport Talk Technology Travel Been there ---------------------- Audio Email services Special reports The Guardian The northerner The wrap ---------------------- Advertising guide Crossword Soulmates dating Headline service Syndication services Events offers Help contacts Feedback Information GNL press office Living our values Newsroom Notes Queries Reader Offers Style guide Travel offers TV listings Weather Web guides Working at GNL ---------------------- Guardian Weekly Money Observer Public Networkhome UKnews Worldlatest Books Money Film Society TheObserver Politics Education Shopping Work Football Jobs Media Search And Darwin created us all... As two of the world's great Darwinists prepare to debate whether science is killing the soul, Tim Radford asks if natural selection is the key to life, the universe, and everything Guardian Saturday February 6, 1999 Slapstick is no laughing matter: that involuntary response to a pratfall tells us something about where we come from and how we got here. The sound called laughter developed as a kin signal, according to Professor VS Ramachandran. It is a way of alerting those who share your genes that the comic tumble you have just witnessed is a false alarm. Your clan members need not waste precious energy rushing to the aid of the fallen, discomfited to find himself suddenly horizontal. 'Laughter is nature's it's-okay signal,' he told a conference in California last month. 'It's a false alarm signal, just as a baby's cry is an alarm signal.' So a sense of the comic is a valuable evolutionary adaptation, honed by nature to enhance chances of survival. Why not? Pain and fear are part of the inborn, inherited survival kit. Those rare individuals with no sense of pain are usually dead before 30. Fear is an advantageous trick that helps keep you alive. A genetic mutation for discretion as the better part of valour would be a runaway success. So far, so obvious: Charles Darwin's great explanation for life on earth is now a standard alibi for human phenomena. A tendency to obesity? Ice Age hunter-gatherers who could store fat easily would be much more likely to survive in the lean seasons of a glacial planet. Diabetes and heart disease? None of us were meant to stay fat for long. Sexual desire? Sex is a terrific way of spreading genes around. But the operation of natural selection upon random mutation - Darwin hardly used the word 'evolution' in The Origin Of Species in 1859 - has become an answer to almost everything. Altruism? Self-sacrifice? A sense of duty? How useful to a community it would be if one man was prepared to give his life for the people, providing they were his people. Care for the weak or helpless? Such things are reciprocal: the community benefits. If other primates care for each other - and a group of rhesus monkeys in Wisconsin has been observed caring tenderly for a monkey with Down's syndrome - then why should there be anything special about humans being humane? Diplomacy and negotiation? Chimpanzees resolve conflicts that way: how else would humans, their nearest relatives, conduct their affairs? The arguments go on. Abstract art? The hand-eye co-ordination necessary to etch like Rembrandt or paint rocks like a cave man is an evolutionary benefit, a by-product of the skill needed to fashion perfectly-balanced throwing spears. But it could explain a taste for Picasso's Cubism, according to Ramachandran, a neuroscientist from San Diego. The capacity to abstract lines from a world in which there are no sharp, defining lines, and use them to recreate imagery in the mind, exists in rats and gulls, too. One great animal behaviour expert discovered more than four decades ago that seagull chicks anxious to be fed would peck, not just at the mother gull's beak, but at a brown stick with a yellow dot at one end, or even a stick with three yellow stripes. What the chick saw, says Ramachandran, was a super-stimulus, a caricature in what he called 'beak space'. If there were an art gallery in the seagull world, this super-beak would qualify as a great work of art, a Picasso. Some Darwinians take things further: God is part of the package. A belief system is a powerful part of the human armament - how else do you explain hope? This religious sense exists because of the brain, and the brain is evolution's gift, but there is more. God, says the old hymn, be in my head and in my understanding, and that is exactly where some neuroscientists think they have found Him, in the limbic system, a 'God module' where transcendent experiences happen. Sufferers from grand mal (temporal lobe epilepsy) often report profound spiritual experiences; some are convinced that they have heard the voice of God. The neuroscientists are cautious about this: as Ramachandran observes, God works in mysterious ways, why shouldn't He choose the limbic system to reveal Himself? But others take matters much further. Politicians and economists hijacked Darwinism to explain dog-eat-dog social attitudes more than 100 years ago. People have invoked it to describe the growth of cities, the pop music market, the convergent design of the aeroplane and the supremacy of computer operating systems. The American philosopher Daniel Dennett recently called Darwin's hypothesis 'the single best idea anyone has ever had'. He saw it as a universal acid, eating through every traditional concept, leaving a revolutionised world-view: it transformed psychology, politics, ethics, and religion. It could certainly transform cosmology: a Pennsylvania physicist, Professor Lee Smolin, recently proposed that maybe Darwin rules okay across whole universes. If this universe, the one we are in now, popped into existence, what from? Some other universe? Perhaps universes pop out of each other all the time, each with its own mutations of physical laws? Perhaps the successful ones survive long enough to reproduce themselves by means of black holes, with intelligent life as a by-product along the way? What is that, if not natural selection operating on random mutation, Darwinism as alpha and omega? You could call it creation science, if the phrase hadn't been bagged already by a very different group. Darwin proposed the origins of life in a warm pond full of primeval organic chemicals. The latest consensus sees life fashioning itself from hot brines in some submarine volcanic vent. All flesh is indeed grass, which is in turn recycled clay, but the mystery has always been what, or Who, triggered this great chain of being? Churchmen used to argue that self-creating life was as likely as a monkey randomly batting typewriter keys and typing out the Bible without a mistake. But think of monkeys and typewriters Darwin's way, says Professor Cesare Emiliani of Miami. It might take a monkey an eternity to type the 6 million characters of the Bible by chance, but suppose natural selection were a rubber that erased each mistyped letter - or each unsatisfactory mutation - immediately? Assume 13 mistakes for each successful letter, and at the rate of a keystroke per second, you could have the whole of Holy Writ in 13 times 6 million seconds, or two and a half years. Natural selection knows what it requires: all it does is eliminate the unsatisfactory attempts. 'Given the chemical and environmental conditions of the primitive earth,' Emiliani says, 'the appearance of life was a foregone conclusion. Only divine intervention could have kept the planet Earth sterile.' A British bishop once caused a storm in the Church of England by stating what now seems the obvious: God was not a funny old man with a beard. He said that before the full implications of the new revolution in biology - begun by Crick and Watson's explanation of the genetic code in 1953 -had sunk in. Now the faith once placed in God is laid at the feet of a funny old man with a beard who walked round his garden in the village of Down, in Kent, 150 years ago. Natural selection isn't just a proposition that might explain how stripes would favour tigers in the jungle, or big antlers benefit a stag. It is something scientists can see happening when they throw antibiotics at a bacterium, or drugs at a virus, or weedkiller at grasses: they can pinpoint the genetic mutations that give one strain an advantage, and dismiss another to oblivion. The new Darwinism sometimes sounds like a religion. People believe in it: they make an act of faith. Darwinism is naturally a 'broad church' and within it are sects, schisms and heresies. People who talk about it slip into the language of religion, refer to some scientists as 'high priests' and those who follow them as acolytes. Edward O Wilson, the Harvard biologist brought up as a Southern Baptist, tackled this in his recent book Consilience (LittleBrown). 'Could Holy Writ be just the first literate attempt to explain the universe and make ourselves significant within it?' he asked. 'Perhaps science is a continuation on new and better-tested ground to attain the same end. If so, then in that sense science is religion liberated and at large.' That explains why words like 'zealot' get thrown at Richard Dawkins, the Oxford zoologist, who over two decades ago stirred up the Darwinian community with his book The Selfish Gene, and has been exploring the argument since, most lately with Unweaving The Rainbow (Penguin). Steven Pinker, a professor from Massachusetts Institute of Technology who produced the blockbuster How The Mind Works (also Penguin), says it makes him groan when newspapers call him the 'pop messiah' of evolutionary psychology. He also doesn't like being called a Darwinian 'fundamentalist' by the scientist and writer Stephen Jay Gould. It's an epithet designed to make people you might disagree with look like dogmatic fanatics. He does not, for instance, see ethics as part of, or even the province of, science. 'A complete theory of the universe won't say that it is wrong to kill, but it is wrong to kill,' he says. 'I don't have anything mystical in mind - just as many mathematicians believe that numbers are in some sense real, not figments of our mathematical modules, it could be that ethical statements are real. Even if they are not, we may be wired up so that we can't help but treat ethical statements as real, and practically, that amounts to the same thing.' Some might argue that Mozart's music is objectively beautiful, rather than beautiful because humans find it so. He's not so sure about that: he's of the Ramachandran persuasion. He doesn't see Darwinism in every nook and cranny of creation: explaining the evolution of the brain and the body is quite tough enough. It requires painstaking, step-at-a-time argument, rather than leaps of faith, though he admits to some sympathy with the parallel. 'I rather think that all scientists are excited about their work,' he says, 'perhaps even involving similar emotional circuitry activated in preachers and prophets: but if so, it's a distraction - the only thing that should count is whether the theory explains the facts.' Richard Dawkins claims to have a blind spot for paintings. His latest work is much more concerned with provoking people into understanding the beauty and poetry of science. He doesn't think the question of whether Darwinism explains the universe as well as life is very interesting. 'It's all of a piece with the general sort of challenge: how do you explain X, using Darwinism, where X is - fill it in - almost any human habit. It could be art, it could be philosophy, it could be mathematics.' He sees human brains as being designed by evolution long ago to survive in the African savannah and through the Ice Ages. 'What we do with them now is only very indirectly interpretable.' Humans, he once pointed out, have a great hunger for explanation, which may be why religion is such a universal phenomenon. Most religions offered a cosmology and a biology, a theory of life, a theory of origins. In that sense, Darwinism was not religion: instead, religion was science - bad science. Dawkins once famously described religion as a virus that infected the collective brain: ever since, he says, radio, television and newspaper interviewers have needled him, trying to get him to lash out at the church again. 'I'm like a pit bull terrier, being released into the ring, as a spectator sport, to attack religious people,' he says philosophically. 'I've done it once or twice.' Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins will share a platform in a Guardian Dillons Debate: Is Science Killing The Soul? The debate, to be chaired by Tim Radford, the Guardian's science editor, will be at 7pm on Wednesday, February 10, at Westminster Central Hall, Storey's Gate, London SW1. Tickets: 0171 467 1613. Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
Steven Pinker: the mind readerIn room 10-250 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the brightest undergraduates in America are filing in for the start of their Thursday afternoon lecture. These students, taking psychology 101, are drawn from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds, and all of them, men and women, are dressed in the same baggy, designer-labelled sportswear. They are fresh-faced and polite, chattering about assignments and movies, and seem overwhelmingly confident that life will go well for them.
Guardian Unlimited | Archive Search Go to: Guardian Unlimited home UK news World news Newsblog ---------------------- Archive search Arts Books EducationGuardian.co.uk Film Football Jobs MediaGuardian.co.uk Money The Observer Politics Science Shopping SocietyGuardian.co.uk Sport Talk Technology Travel Been there ---------------------- Audio Email services Special reports The Guardian The northerner The wrap ---------------------- Advertising guide Crossword Soulmates dating Headline service Syndication services Events offers Help contacts Feedback Information GNL press office Living our values Newsroom Notes Queries Reader Offers Style guide Travel offers TV listings Weather Web guides Working at GNL ---------------------- Guardian Weekly Money Observer Public Networkhome UKnews Worldlatest Books Money Film Society TheObserver Politics Education Shopping Work Football Jobs Media Search The Guardian Profile Steven Pinker: the mind reader He has the looks of a rock star, a fondness for early Woody Allen movies, and a world-class reputation as a scientist and writer. Ed Douglas on the evolutionary psychologist with a popular touch and a mission to explain how the brain works Guardian Saturday November 6, 1999 In room 10-250 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the brightest undergraduates in America are filing in for the start of their Thursday afternoon lecture. These students, taking psychology 101, are drawn from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds, and all of them, men and women, are dressed in the same baggy, designer-labelled sportswear. They are fresh-faced and polite, chattering about assignments and movies, and seem overwhelmingly confident that life will go well for them. When Labour's education policy-makers dream of the future, they see rooms full of young adults like this speaking Estuary English. As the students gossip, the slight and compact figure of Steven Pinker arrives at the dais to start the lecture. He is often described as looking like a rock star, and his curly shoulder-length mane and Cuban heels give him the air of a prog rocker on his third comeback tour. He has a superbly defined jaw, glittering blue eyes and a kilowatt smile which he beams at his class as he switches on the microphone. Then he starts talking. Some of his students have not read their lecturer's books and do not know just how high he flies in the neuroscientific firmament, but they sit in rapt attention. Pinker is a brilliant lecturer, scything through complex ideas and punctuating his remarks with good-natured wisecracks about how dumb Harvard students are and plenty of references to popular culture, although he seems touchingly confident that 19-year-olds are familiar with early Woody Allen. Jay Keyser, vice provost of MIT and an old friend of Pinker's, says "you cannot overestimate the value of a good example and Steve is a master of that. He's got to be one of the best teachers in the country." Today's lecture includes a generous-spirited skewering of Descartes, and a more directed dissection of the leading behaviourist BF Skinner. It draws Pinker into a deft overview of one of the central psychological debates of the century, that between nature and nurture. He outlines the structure of the brain and argues that it is the interaction of different modules within it, honed by millions of years of evolution, which generates the conscious mind. Pinker's fields of study have focused on two of these areas, visual cognition and language, and his best-selling analysis of the latter, The Language Instinct, launched him into the lucrative and rarefied orbit of popular writers on science like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins. Pinker is also a convert to the controversial theories behind evolutionary psychology, developed by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby at the University of California, which have been attacked on several fronts. For Pinker, who took the guiding principle of the pioneer thinker on psychology, Noam Chomsky, that language is an inherited ability, created and refined by natural selection, and made it comprehensible for the masses, the idea that other aspects of human psychology are inherited is self-evidently true. Pinker used evolutionary psychology as one of the two main planks for his second best-seller, How The Mind Works; the other being the idea that the brain is an organ whose function is computation. For large swathes of intellectual culture, however, the very idea of evolutionary psychology is at best speculative and at worst unholy. Pinker - an atheist - has been condemned by the religious right, but also by feminists who reject the implications of female behaviour being in any way "hard-wired" into women. He claims to support "equity feminism" but is dismissive of "gender feminism" which, he says is "usually associated with media feminists over the age of 40 and study centres in universities who... see all differences between the sexes as socially constructed". That, he says is factually wrong: "It's a logical and tactical mistake." One of his "favourite preposterous arguments," he says, is "that because I believe that the male desire for multiple sexual partners has an evolutionary explanation (as opposed to a cultural explanation), I am excusing or apologising for men who sleep around". Stephen Jay Gould has been withering in his dismissal of "evo- psych", describing its proponents as holding a "penchant for narrow and often barren speculation" which can be characterised as "pure guess-work in the cocktail-party mode". The two men indulged in a vituperative exchange in the New York Review of Books which generated more heat and, presumably, book sales, than understanding, and which proved, according to New Scientist, "only that Gould had a bigger dictionary than Pinker". The criticism didn' t stop there. Tom Wolfe, articulating the attitude of many writers and artists, said he was depressed by the trend of neuroscience to extinguish the notion of a "soul" and replace it with the function of an organ. Pinker's arguments about the brain as an organ of computation, in effect a hugely powerful computer, was also savaged by those in arts faculties alarmed at what they perceived as a reductionist argument par excellence. "They attacked the notion that there is such a thing as the mind that can be studied separately from the surrounding culture," Pinker says. "They treat the mind as a temporary repository for the auto-nomous ideas that congregate in a culture, and believe that the proper study of the mind is the study of words and images that float around in society." At a more fundamental level, perhaps, is the fear that Pinker' s conclusions, like those of his intellectual stablemates Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, are somehow dehumanising, that they undermine our identities as individuals and portray us instead as meat robots or gene machines. It was a fear best articulated by some British reviewers of How The Mind Works. "They absolutely trashed me on that point," Pinker says. "It reminded me of George Bernard Shaw's rejection of Darwinism because natural selection made all human hopes and aspirations a sham. It's a very materialist view of the mind, that sense that we're nothing more than a collection of richocheting molecules in the head. Does this eliminate free will, or deep meaning, or purpose?" In the Tanner lectures on human values, which Pinker gave at Yale last spring, he described this interpretation of his ideas as seeing life as a "village with only a faade of value and worth. If we love our children, as evolutionary psychology suggests, because the genes for loving children are in the bodies of those children" - as well as in our own bodies - "and the genes are thereby benefiting copies of themselves, wouldn't that undermine the inherent goodness of that love and the value of the self-sacrifice that parenting entails?" In an illustration more typical of Pinker's cultural taste, he quotes the opening scene of Woody Allen's movie Annie Hall, when the young Alvy Singer tells a psychiatrist that he won't do his homework because the universe is expanding. If the universe is going to fall apart, he says, what is the point of human existence? "What has the universe got to do with it?" his mother wails at him. "You' re here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!" "That kind of reductionism is confusing two levels of analysis," Pinker says. "We have meaning and purpose here inside our heads, being the organisms that we are. We have brains that make it impossible for us to live our lives except in terms of meaning and purpose. The fact that you can look at meaning and purpose in one way, as a neuro-psychological phenomenon, doesn' t mean you can' t look at it in another way, in terms of how we live our lives." The collection of genes known as Steven Pinker made the point most forcibly in How The Mind Works, where he explained his own decision not to have children - which apparently runs counter to the demands of evolution - and says that if his genes don't like it, "they can take a running jump." He was married in 1980 to Nancy Etcoff, the clinical psychologist, neuropsychologist, and author of the recent book Survival of the Prettiest. The marriage lasted 12 years. He married his second wife, Ilavenil Subbiah, a Malaysian-born cognitive psychologist turned scientific illustrator and graphic artist, in 1995. She illustrated his two most recent books. He stands by his earlier decision not to have children: "We still have no children - for the same reason that most people don't have 13 or 14 children, though they could surely afford them, and by a common misreading of Darwin, ought to want that many. We just take that decision to its logical extreme." For some, evo-psych has disturbing political undertones, and like so-called socio-biology in the 1970s, it is open to abuse by those with an often right-wing political agenda. Morality is just one particularly fraught issue. Pinker cites the growing evidence that a sense of morality has a genetic element. "There is more in the moral faculty than just internalised lessons," he says. "We know some people seem to lack a moral sense almost in the same way that colour-blind people lack a photo-pigment. They seem to be chillingly devoid of this moral faculty, but not stupid, not socially inept and often ingenious in their ability to manipulate emotions." He argues that an innate sense of justice is another aspect of evolutionary psychology, that an imperative to punish evil, as he terms it, and reward virtue is "likely to be an evolved set of emotions" while acknowledging that there are variations on what is considered evil. "The only tenable [law-enforcement] system is one that treats all intellectually normal people as responsible, if for no other reason than to have incentives in place that even sociopaths will use to control their behaviour." He opposes capital punishment "because of the costs of getting it wrong", and describes himself as "eclectically, non-dogmatically, libertarian". But for a man who is accused of describing us as biological machines, he holds a very strong line on what makes us human. It has to do with our sense of wider humanity. "Ultimately," he concludes, "the question is: 'How great is the circle?' Does it include the guys in the next village, the guys over the mountain range, children, foetuses, patients in a vegetative state, animals etc? I think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game." This powerful streak of individualism runs through all his writing. In the Tanner lecture, he wrote an excoriating passage on how the behaviourism of the 1950s and1960s led to bizarre judicial manoeuverings and cited the Twinkie defence used by Dan White, tried for the murder of San Francisco mayor George Moscone in 1978. White claimed that an addiction to sugary foods had affected his brain chemistry and was sentenced to five years. More recently, other defendants have used genetic defences in an attempt to avoid incarceration. "The apparent threat to the traditional notion of free will has nothing to do with genetic, neurobiological, or evolutionary explanations of behaviour," Pinker says. "It is raised by any explanation of behaviour. There is nothing specific to brains, genes, or evolutionary history that lends itself to bogus justifications for bad behaviour; any explanation can be abused in that way." In the same way, he dismisses those males who justify promiscuity or adultery by gleefully falling on evolutionary psychology as an excuse by claiming they are only behaving as their genes have programmed them to do. We have an inheritance, he argues, but we also have free will. His clear thinking on these issues, maintained despite the passionate opposition he meets, is paradoxically life-affirming. Far from our natures - our genetic inheritance - ruling us and undermining our sense of identity, we can, according to Pinker, take refuge in a sense of common identity. "The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate, which justifies the dismissal of people's stated wants as an artefact of a particular time and place and thereby licences the top-down redesign of society, is a totalitarian's dream." Pinker was born on September 18, 1954, in Montreal's Anglophone Jewish community. "I was never religious in the theological sense," he says, "I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew. Montreal had a vibrant Jewish community, a generation closer to Europe than the ones in American cities." Jay Keyser has no doubt about the origin of his eclectic wisdom: "It comes from growing up in the same town as Mordecai Richler. There' s something about Montreal that does it to you. It doesn' t surprise me that Steve Pinker started there." His father had graduated in law but worked as "a travelling salesman of ladies clothing" who bought and rented apartments as a sideline. While the children were small, his mother was "what we would now call a home-maker," Pinker says. Later she took a master's degree and became a guidance counsellor - they called her "Pink the Shrink" - and then a high-school vice-principal. Long after Pinker had gone to college, his father began practising law. His younger sister worked for years as a child psychologist - "she's trained to actually do something" - and now writes as well. His brother, 12 years younger, is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. Pinker is a private man: Keyser describes him as "surprisingly shy", and when discussion shifts away from his work and ideas to his family, Pinker becomes quite withdrawn. But when asked if his parents generated his interested in psychology, he replies with an even broader grin than usual: "Yes, it comes from my parents. The question is, how it comes from my parents." Of his childhood, all he will say is: "Certainly I had unhappy moments, but no more than any other kid." When teased about the regular comments journalists make on his rock-star looks and asked if, as an adolescent, he had shared the fantasy of being a musician, his reply almost serves to confirm Keyser' s view: "I have to confess that watching rock'n'roll concerts, I did fantasise about being up on stage," and then he adds quickly: "Not in the lead. I never wanted to be Mick Jagger. Maybe the bass-player or the drummer. But I never, ever played air guitar." He now listens to jazz and blues predominantly and "used to go to the movies until they got so bad." Pinker studied psychology at McGill University in Montreal and moved to Harvard as a post-grad. He was just a few years too young to be an authentic 1960s radical, but, he says, he experienced it vicariously through the older siblings of friends. "I was a 13-year-old anarchist, and wanted to study human nature, through anthropology, psychoanalysis, and psychology. I was a Rousseauan then; now I'm a Hobbesian. I started out at a two-year college dominated by hippies, Marxists, and US draft dodgers, but when I was elected student rep for psychology, the department head talked me out of psychoanalytic theory and into scientific, laboratory-oriented psychology." Steve Kosslyn, professor of psychology at Harvard, says: "He was officially my student, but almost from the start we were colleagues." When he discovered the field of cognitive science, "partly through the McGill University course catalogue, partly through reading about the Chomskyan revolution in magazines, and was told that people might 'pay' you to study the mind, I knew what I wanted to do with my life." Pinker says it was "a romantic career choice - all the papers were running stories about unemployed PhDs driving taxis, and going to graduate school was considered about as practical as becoming a painter or jazz musician. But that was a pretty tame form of rebellion and I was hardly a hellion - a good student, did fewer drugs than Bill Clinton, never drank in college, not even beer." His career in visual cognition, effectively working out how the brain processes the information received by the eye, was spent researching how three-dimensional space is represented as visual mental images and on the range of attention the eye holds beyond its focus, both immensely complex. Another area of innovation focused on the psychology of charts and graphs and why the human brain finds them so satisfactory. "His work is virtually unique in the field, and I predict that more than one career will be made in following up his seminal thoughts on the topic," Kosslyn says. "He has an enormous breadth of interests and competences. It is virtually unheard of for someone to have accomplished so much in two such widely disparate areas as he has." Pinker continued working on visual cognition until the early 1990s alongside his interest in language, but it is the latter which has made him famous, even though he is quick to point out that he is no linguist. "Fundamentally, I am a psychologist and a cognitive scientist. Language is just one branch of cognition." At Harvard, he got to know the psychology professor Roger Brown, who had a profound effect on the young Pinker, not least in the field of language acquisition, where Brown was the first to apply the ideas of Chomsky. Jay Keyser, who brought Pinker to MIT in 1979 when he was director of the centre for cognitive studies, was a linguist and Pinker took the chance Keyser offered to broaden his interests. Keyser says wryly: "He was the duck, I was supplying the water." "Think about the phrase 'We holded the baby rabbits'," Pinker says. "It' s the perfect example of how children are not just parroting what they hear but are actively combining things according to rules. I chose to study it at the point I realised that we knew next to nothing about why it should be so. We knew that kids made the error, but we didn't know why they start doing it and why they stop. It seemed a great opening to gather lots of interesting data on an issue that had theoretical implications as well." Had he continued mining those areas where his curiosity led him, Pinker would have had a highly regarded academic career about which the public would have known almost nothing. But with the publication of The Language Instinct in 1994, he took the mass of ideas and research that had been going on into the different branches of language and linguistics and explained them clearly, which was miracle enough, but also with a brilliant and witty eye for illustration. Keyser says "He was a careful worker, obviously a player. Then came The Language Instinct and he suddenly found a voice that may have been buried in his work but which I hadn't seen before. And it was superb. It was the perfect tone about a really complicated field to an intelligent lay audience that had not been adressed." In the book, Pinker good-naturedly demolished the arguments of those he terms the "language mavens", those guardians of correct speaking, and presented language as vibrant, flexible and constantly evolving. He also gave a transparent explanation of Chomsky's notoriously difficult ideas about the evolutionary development of language and how it is represented in the brain - while remaining level-headed about their usefulness. "I don't think Chomsky's ideas ever won widespread acceptance among psychologists or even linguists," he says. "I support the idea that language has some kind of biological specificity, that our brains are optimised for language." Did he ever worry that people will be dismantling his work in the same way? He grimaces. "I'd be naive to think that they won't." Pinker's new book Words And Rules is full of his trademark asides; cartoon strips sit alongside an exegesis on Wittgenstein; he describes those areas of the brain responsible for language as having the appearance of roadkill. You can dismiss such leavening analogies as being glib, or praise Pinker for being accessible, but the underlying strength of his popular science writing is to explain with ease current psychological research in a decade which has seen exponential development in our understanding of how our brains function. Words And Rules effectively starts out as a book about regular and irregular verbs, which sounds crushingly dull but is, in Pinker's hands, compelling and revelatory in unlocking a crucial area of human psychology. The presence of verbs which form their past tense by adding the suffix "-ed", regular verbs, and verbs which form their past tense in non-regular ways, is shown by Pinker to be an expression of a fundamental dichotomy in the way the brain functions. Language is generated by a combination of memory and generative rules, a process that applies equally to other areas of cognition. So when your three-year-old tells you they "bringed you a cup of tea" they may be technically wrong, but they are performing a mental task of almost bewildering sophistication. According to Harvard neuropsychologist Alfonso Caramazza, it is for his observations of this duality within the brain that Pinker will be remembered as a scientist: "Steve' s thinking about it is especially clear and because of that he has been able to formulate the questions more clearly than others and what kind of arguments are relevant." Oliver Morton wrote in the New Yorker that How The Mind Works, "marks out the territory on which the coming century's debate about human nature will be held." Talking to Pinker or listening to his lectures, it is difficult not to be overwhelmed by his rangy intelligence, and even more difficult not to like him. But the world is a messier place than a lecture hall in Boston full of bright students, and outside academia the current debate on human nature can seem isolating and overly materialistic - plenty of people are finding the twentieth century a sterile and loveless place. Yet Pinker says: "We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why," he adds with a huge smile, "are we so miserable?" Of course, by and large, we' re not and there is research to prove it but given the pace of material improvement in our lives, we're not that much happier either. Pinker says: "One of the things that people complain about is loneliness, disconnectedness. If you live in a society where your life is rarely threatened and most of your relationships are more on an economic exchange basis, then this could leave people feeling less connected. It might even create a need for fictive allies, especially in men." Pinker's relish for ideas and explaining them leaves little room to get the sense that he empathises with the failures and disappointments most of us experience, of feeling anything but curiosity about the stricken man. His world, like that of his students, seems too good to be true - until he discusses his now-dead mentor Roger Brown. Pinker describes Brown as like Cary Grant, tall, debonair, impossibly charming, a brilliant thinker who escaped a poor background in Detroit and went on to make a huge contribution to the understanding of how language is acquired by children. He was also a homosexual - Brown himself said he was "born too early to be gay" - and following the death of his partner in the late 1980s suffered horribly, both psychologcially and physically, and seemed to dismantle his own personality with deliberate care. He published a memoir in which he presented himself as "vain, needy, histrionic, jealous, addicted and downright foolish". Brown committed suicide in 1997 and Pinker wrote his friend' s obituary, an uncharacteristically sober and sympathetic piece, for a specialist journal. "Roger, a social psychologist," wrote Pinker, "knew more than anyone that one of the strongest human motives is impression management, the desire to look good. And no one would have had an easier time making himself look good than Roger. But he chose not to leave us with that impression. It would be comforting to remember Roger only in his Cary Grant persona, and to write off the last decade as a pathology of grief and ageing. But that would not be true to Roger the real person_ or to Roger the great psychologist and writer, who had so often enlivened his observations about human beings with observations of himself. "For Roger chose to leave us with one last set of observations of the human species. He reminded us of the fragility of happiness, the inscrutability of our passions, and the elusiveness of the self." Steven Pinker Born: September 18, 1954 Montreal, Canada. Education: Bachelor of arts (psychology), McGill University, Montreal,1976: doctor of philosophy (experimental psychology), Harvard University, 1979. Academic Positions: Assistant professor, department of psychology, Stanford University 1981-82; assistant professor, department of psychology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1982-85; co-director, centre for cognitive science, MIT 1985-94; professor, department of brain and cognitive sciences MIT 1994-. Some publications: Language Learnability And Language Development, 1984; Learnability And Cognition: The Acquisition Of Argument structure ,1989; The Language Instinct ,1994; How The Mind Works, 1997; Words and Rules: The Ingredients Of Language, 1999. Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
Origins of the speciousAndrew Brown explains why 'Introducing Evolutionary Psychology', the latest in Icon Books' popular series of comic books on important subjects, has been withdrawn from sale while 10,000 stickers are pasted over the face of Steven Rose.
Guardian Unlimited | Archive Search Go to: Guardian Unlimited home UK news World news Newsblog ---------------------- Archive search Arts Books EducationGuardian.co.uk Film Football Jobs MediaGuardian.co.uk Money The Observer Politics Science Shopping SocietyGuardian.co.uk Sport Talk Technology Travel Been there ---------------------- Audio Email services Special reports The Guardian The northerner The wrap ---------------------- Advertising guide Crossword Soulmates dating Headline service Syndication services Events offers Help contacts Feedback Information GNL press office Living our values Newsroom Notes Queries Reader Offers Style guide Travel offers TV listings Weather Web guides Working at GNL ---------------------- Guardian Weekly Money Observer Public Networkhome UKnews Worldlatest Books Money Film Society TheObserver Politics Education Shopping Work Football Jobs Media Search Inside Story Origins of the specious They're all Darwin's children, but for years leading scientists have been engaged in an unseemly squabble over just how much human behaviour can be explained by our DNA. Now, a row over a comic book has escalated the feud. Andrew Brown reports Guardian Tuesday November 30, 1999 Introducing Evolutionary Psychology, the latest in Icon Books' popular series of comic books on important subjects, has been withdrawn from sale while 10,000 stickers are pasted over the face of Steven Rose, professor of biology at the Open university, on page 155. The stickers contain an apology dictated by Rose, along with a plug for his latest book Lifelines, alongside the original speech bubble which, as the sticker points out, is "a misleading caricature of his views... which in no way represents his well-known scientific opinions on the complex interactions between biological and social environment during development." None the less, misleading caricatures are common in disputes about evolutionary biology. The more popular they are, the more misleading they become. Rose is himself a fearsomely rude controversialist. Why force a correction by mentioning legal advice in a letter of complaint to the publishers? The answer, he says, is that the offence was committed in a speech bubble. "The author had literally put into my mouth a completely fatuous statement which was not one which any biologist or any sane person would make." The original bubble says: "Whether you become a genius or an idiot depends entirely on what environment you live in", and it's hard to see how anyone with even an O-level in biology could say that. "I am happy to have a public discussion about intellectual or scientific or political issues," says Rose. "But a bubble in somebody's mouth making a completely fatuous statement is simply defamatory." The author, Dylan Evans, a post-graduate student at the LSE, has apologised to Rose, and the publishers, like the professor, feel that the whole affair is over, or will be, as soon as all the stickers are on and the book is out. But Evans has also complained on an internet mailing list, and to various newspapers, that the affair raises questions of academic freedom. "There is something very worrying when academics resort to threats of legal action to settle intellectual disputes. Indeed, when academics become so litigious, this raises serious questions about the freedom of academic debate." Rose replies that this was not an academic dispute; it was a simple matter of factual accuracy. He also says that he had never threatened legal action, just pointed out to the publishers that he had been advised that the original speech bubble was defamatory. "The advice I would have for Dylan Evans is very simple. When you're in a hole, stop digging." Under the contract with Icon Books, Evans has to bear all the costs for the restickering, so it has obviously proved a costly and painful mistake for him. But his attempts to recast the story as one of persecution for daring to talk about the role of genes in human development are not entirely convincing. "I spend my research life studying genes down a microscope," says Rose. If anything, the affair shows up once more the abyss of incomprehension and mistrust which separates the two sides in the long-running feud over evolutionary psychology. Rose is perhaps the leading opponent of evolutionary psychology, and the London School of Economics (LSE), where Dylan Evans works, is its leading outpost in Britain. The Darwin seminars, run by the philosopher Helena Cronin at the LSE, have introduced an entire generation of metropolitan intellectuals to the delights of Darwinian analysis as a means to answer almost every question about human nature, from why children don't like spinach to why so few women run large US companies. She has arranged for many of the founders of evolutionary psychology to lecture there. But they have not convinced sceptics such as Rose that these theories are more than superficially plausible and certainly not that they represent properly established scientific truth. In a recent article, angrily circulated by Evans, Rose dismisses "the gallery of shallow ideologically driven thinkers grouped around the quasi-defunct Darwin Centre". This is not especially rude by the standards of polemics in this field. The American evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have published a blistering attack on Stephen Jay Gould on their website . It is easy to see roughly who is on which side is these arguments. Rose's allies include the philosopher Mary Midgley and the American biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. Those on the other side include Richard Dawkins, Matt Ridley and Helena Cronin in this country; Dan Dennett, Steven Pinker and EO Wilson in the US. The long and tangled webs of personal friendships and enmities involved go back, in some cases, to the 60s, and the questions in dispute range over almost every aspect of human nature. Rose, for example, first became embroiled over claims about the genetic factor in human intelligence. It is, broadly speaking, true that the critics of evolutionary psychology are on the left politically. The angrier their criticism, the further to the left they tend to be, because they believe that bad science matters more when it is used to condone injustice. The supporters of evolutionary psychology are more widely spread politically, but share at least a folk memory of being oppressed by political correctness, after the early campaigns against them in the 70s. To the leftwing critics of evolutionary psychology, much of it is simply "Flintstones anthropology" that justifies inequality and injustice by invoking Science, just as 19th-century Christianity justified "the rich man at his castle, the poor man at his gate" by invoking God. As an example of the areas in dispute, consider the theory of Kingsley Browne, an American lawyer, as to why there appears to be a "glass ceiling" which prevents women from rising to the top of large corporations, even after 30 years of equal-opportunity legislation. In a recent book from the Darwin Centre at the LSE, Browne argues that there is, in fact, no glass ceiling. Inequality of out comes under present legislation is a result of men being born more competitive: women, he claims, have evolved to be less interested in risk-taking than men, essentially because, among our ancestors, women were attracted to high-status males, and males gained status by successfully taking risks. In the nature of things, this is going to produce very strong selection for males who are good at taking risks. You might think that the qualities which make a successful hunter of sabre-tooth tigers are not those which distinguish a widely feared accountant, but that is where the second half of Browne's argument comes in. Risk-taking, he says, is what unites the successful hunter and the successful CEO. Men reach the top of companies because they have evolved to care more about status than women and to risk more to get it. That's why they get paid more, and there is nothing we can do about it. This is a fairly typical example of modern evolutionary psychology reasoning, in that it is plausible and a lot more subtle than it may seem; but also really very hard to prove, and - if you take it seriously - fraught with policy-making consequences. Rose claimed, in a recent article, that it is simply "a last-gasp attempt to recruit 'science' to hold back the rising tide of change". I think he's unfair to Browne's theory, which confines itself to asking why men get more of the very top jobs, rather than claiming that men will always find themselves in the best-paying and most interesting jobs as a consequence of biological fact. But it is clear that such reasoning could be used to obnoxious political effect and that it doesn't have the status of established scientific truth in the way that some other theories about genes and their effects do. What makes these disputes so difficult to isolate, or to understand away from their personal and political matrix, is that everyone is a Darwinian now. All the parties in these disputes talk about genes, and offer Darwinian explanations. How did this come about? The answer is to be found in the way that when the two sides talk about "genes" they mean rather different things. The evolutionary psychologists are heirs to an intellectual revolution in the 60s and early 70s, whose excitement is clearly preserved in Richard Dawkins' first book, The Selfish Gene. They saw that you could talk confidently and with mathematical rigour about the effects of genes on behaviour, even if you didn't ask which bit of DNA was which gene exactly, nor how it worked. So, to give a controversial example, we can be confident that there are genes for human intelligence which are different from the genes which cause a chimpanzee's brain to grow as it does. It is both a strength and a weakness of this view that we can do this without having any idea of how many genes we are talking about, or any account of how they produce their effects. The mathematics and the game theory are independent of the mechanism. But for Rose and for other biologists who actually work on the details of the mechanism, this is not enough. They don't want to know which hypothesised genes might have the effects that theory demands; they want to know which identified genes have the actual effects, and how. This is something which we do not understand even when examining C Elegans , a transparent worm with only 943 cells which, last year, became the first multicellular animal to have its genome completely mapped. We know every atom of its DNA. But we still don't understand how this encodes the instructions to turn a single fertilised egg into a complete worm; and C Elegans doesn't even have a brain. When you are dealing with the genetics of human inequality, things would be more complicated even if brains were specified only by genes. But they are not. Your brain is constantly changing physically as the result of experience, and much of this experience is the result of interaction with other brains, and the social systems we and our ancestors have made. Perhaps, far in the future, when the human genome has not just been mapped, but the map has been understood, all these disputes will fade away. But if the evolutionary psychologists are right, they won't. A tendency to argue over genes and human nature is embedded in our genes. Andrew Brown is author of The Darwin Wars (12.99), published by Simon and Schuster Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
Chance would be a fine thingA long-dead clergyman enters the race to make computers think for themselves.
Telegraph newspaper online Login or register | Free e-mail services | Make us your homepage Search Our site Web Search Our site Web Monday 28 November 2005 telegraph.co.uk News Sport Business Personal Finance Travel Motoring Living Jobs SPECIAL REPORTS Energy Saving Trust Climate change: BP Canon Puzzles i-can win Vodafone Software Microsoft Office Business Travel Announcements Arts Books Business Search Classified Adverts Crossword Dating Education Expat Fashion Gardening Health Obituaries Opinion Podcast Property Science Shop Weather Wine Advertising Press Office Promotions Mobile About Us Email Us Site Map NEWS LATEST Saddam trial resumes Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has clashed with the judge as his trial for human rights violations resumed following a 40-day break. Two Britons killed in ambush British aid worker abducted Scrap two-tier pensions Well over a third of people believe that public sector workers under 50 should have their retirement age raised to 65, according to a YouGov survey. N Korea demands reactor project compensation Fears over return of Best's body to Belfast Paul McCartney vows never to perform in China SPORT LATEST Giles gamble for England "A 60 or 70 per cent fit Ashley Giles is a decent enough performer to be in any England team," says captain Michael Vaughan ahead of the crucial third Test against Pakistan. In pics: England salvage draw Warne stars for Australia Live cricket scoreboard Winter tour squads Newcastle expect Owen return In pics: Premiership action Your View: Premiership forum Fantasy Football Six Nations hearing for Moody In pics Moody red mars victory In pics: Hatton unifies belts In pics: Kiwis win Tri-Nations Complete picture gallery index Sport in full FROM TODAY'S PRINT EDITION UK NEWS Police investigate video of beaten marine Blair brushes off minister's call for swift exit We are not being served UK news in full INTERNATIONAL NEWS Blair targets new EU states with budget cut March for girl set alight after marriage refusal Iran's weblogs - the new voice of dissidents International news in full BUSINESS NEWS Rexam weighs up 3bn French takeover Brown proffers regulatory 'olive branch' Ofgem seeks EU price rigging inquiry Business news in full OPINION Rachel Sylvester: Who's in charge? Philip Johnston: Home front Jim White: Best's tabloid battle Opinion in full SPORT Absolutely no sentiment at the bottom World champions need to up tempo Bloodied Hatton is put in healing hands Sport in full EXPAT Frozen pensions case to go to Europe A quest for culinary authenticity Silver surfers put website into the top 10 Expat in full OBITUARIES Jacques Poirier Benedikt Isserlin TELEGRAPH SERVICES Free e-mail services Telegraph Promotions Weekly Telegraph subscription PREVIOUS INSIDE TODAY SNAP AND SEND You can now have your photographs published by the Daily Telegraph. Follow the link above to find out how. PODCAST DOWNLOADS Hear our leading columnists as well as read them - on your PC or iPod. And they're free. Today: Alan Hansen, Anthony King and Ruth Lea. NEWS ON THE GO Our daily updates are getting better. Headlines can now be sent to your BlackBerry three times a day - for FREE. TRAVEL My kind of town: Bombay Iraq plans theme park MOTORING Buyers' guide: Hyundai Coup Prepare your car for winter PERSONAL FINANCE The pet insurance puzzle Free credit switches to end YESTERDAY'S RESULTS FOOTBALL Premiership Everton 1 Newcastle 0 Fulham 2 Bolton 1 Middlesbrough 2 West Brom 2 West Ham 1 Man Utd 2 RUGBY UNION Guinness Premiership Bristol 22 Sale 14 Newcastle 17 Wasps 15 FEATURES How good is the food I give my children? One mini-roll of two? A nutritionist analyses the weekly diets of three different families Still a player Hugh Hefner and his three girlfriends star in a new reality TV show 'Touch the present' Why an illustration by Przemek Sobocki transcends the genre Sledges and saunas The lowdown on Lapland's Christmas for the whole family Hymn to the East End A day in the life of a Londoner, as seen by pop band Saint Etienne Simon Armitage The poet talks about about Jerusalem and chimp's tea parties A girl's best friend? Is Mazda MX-5 fan Erin Baker impressed by the latest version? Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005. Terms Conditions of reading. Commercial information. Privacy and Cookie Policy.
What Is Satisfying About Satisfying Events? Testing 10 Candidate Psychological NeedsKennon M. Sheldon and colleagues find out what makes people happiest.
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Human genome - overview - press releasesComprehensive information on the first draft of the human genome from Nature.
nature genome gateway - human genome - overview - press releases Nature Publishing Group 2003 genome gateway human genome press releases press releases The mapping, sequence and analysis of the human genome are a fundamental advance in self-knowledge and will strike a chord with many people. Application of this knowledge will, in time, materially benefit almost everyone in the world. As such the publication of the human genome is likely to attract a large amount of news coverage in both specialist scientific, and general media alike. Part of Nature's role as a scientific journal is to act as a conduit for the transfer of information from scientists to the 1600 science journalists and writers who receive our press releases. This press release material, written by Nature's science writing team acts as a concise and accessible 'walk-through' of the content of Nature's human genome special issue. A web cast of the joint Celera and International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium press conference is available on the NIH's web site . the genome This is the main sequence paper from the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium. Its 62 pages long, with 49 figures and 27 tables. article Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome THE GENOME INTERNATIONAL SEQUENCING CONSORTIUM Nature 409, 860-921 (15 February 2001) | Summary | Full Text | PDF | the comparison The authors compare the vital statistics for the publicly funded Human Genome Project and the private Celera effort in terms of amount of sequence, gaps, number of unique sequences and continuity of sequence. They find that the two sequences are essentially comparable. While there are some differences at the detailed level, such as how the genomes are packaged and the gap distributions, the authors predict that these differences will quickly be resolved as both sequences become more complete. letter to nature Computational comparison of two draft sequences of the human genome JOHN AACH, MARTHA L. BULYK, GEORGE M. CHURCH, JASON COMANDER, ADNAN DERTI, JAY SHENDURE Nature 409, 856-859 (15 February 2001) | Summary | Full Text | PDF | the guide This 'Guide' helps the novice navigate around the different features of the genome and the type of research described in Nature's pages. letter to nature Guide to the draft human genome TYRA G. WOLFSBERG, JOHANNA MCENTYRE, GREGORY D. SCHULER Nature 409, 824-826 (15 February 2001) | Summary | Full Text | PDF | whole-genome clone-based physical maps Most whole genomes are sequenced by shotgun sequencing. The genome is blasted into fragments and then reassembled. This is easy for small, simple genomes but is a real challenge for the human genome because it is large compared to previously sequenced genomes and also because it is more complex and more repeat-laden than any other genome to have been tackled. The same segment of sequence is often repeated over and over again, sometimes in tandem and sometimes in completely different parts of the genome - this can confuse reassembly of the fragments. To get around this problem, the HGP created a physical map of the genome. They generated a series of overlapping fragments of about 100-200 kilobases covering the entire genome and fingerprinted each of them so they could be mapped relative to each other and positioned on the chromosomes. Each fragment was sequenced, then the sequence was overlaid onto the map scaffold and merged to reassemble the human genome. In their paper, the International Human Genome Mapping Consortium describe how they constructed the first whole-genome physical map, how they created the templates from which the genome was sequenced and demonstrated how the map was essential for the accurate assembly of the human genome by the publicly funded effort. Four short reports accompanying the whole-genome mapping paper (Bruls; Bentley; Kucherlaparti; Page), describe alternative mapping strategies that were implemented for chromosomes 12, 14 and Y, as well as a host of other chromosomes. Information from all these papers were integrated into the whole-genome paper and demonstrate how a rich resource of mapping information can be generated by the cooperation of international independent efforts. article A physical map of the human genome INTERNATIONAL HUMAN GENOME MAPPING CONSORTIUM Nature 409, 934-941 (15 February 2001) | Summary | Full Text | PDF | letter to nature A physical map of human chromosome 14 THOMAS BRLS et al. Nature 409, 947-948 (15 February 2001) | First Paragraph | Full Text | PDF | letter to nature The physical maps for sequencing human chromosomes 1, 6, 9, 10, 13, 20 and X D. R. BENTLEY et al. Nature 409, 942-943 (15 February 2001) | First Paragraph | Full Text | PDF | letter to nature A high-resolution map of human chromosome 12 RAJU KUCHERLAPATI et al. Nature 409, 945-946 (15 February 2001) | First Paragraph | Full Text | PDF | letter to nature A physical map of the human Y chromosome DAVID C. PAGE et al. Nature 409, 943-945 (15 February 2001) | First Paragraph | Full Text | PDF | other maps telomere map Telomeres are the tips of the chromosomes. They are crucial in maintaining the chromosomes' stability and are important in the cell cycle and ageing. Because of the way the physical maps are constructed, many telomeres of chromosomes are left out. Riethman et al. used a special way of capturing the ends of all the telomeres to ensure that the whole-genome map stretches all the way to the tips of the chromosomes. The authors also show from their computational analysis that these areas are not boring junk DNA but contain many interesting gene sequences likely to be important to our cells. letter to nature Integration of telomere sequences with the draft human genome sequence H. C. RIETHMAN, Z. XIANG, S. PAUL, E. MORSE, X.-L. HU, J. FLINT, H.-C. CHI, D. L. GRADY, R. K. MOYZIS Nature 409, 948-951 (15 February 2001) | First Paragraph | Full Text | PDF | Y chromosome The Y is under siege. Not only has it been reduced to a little stump, it has also shut down most of the expression of its genes. It has essentially hunkered down to try to protect itself during battles of the sexes with the X chromosome (women have two X chromosomes; men have one X and one Y). While constructing the map of the Y chromosome, the authors stumbled across some surprises - basically, large chunks of the Y chromosome are repeats, and the regions are so similar that they are almost impossible to tell apart. Many of the male-specific genes lie in these regions, such as those involved in testes development and sperm production. It is possible that this duplication of the regions is a means of ensuring that they arent lost in the battle with the X. letter to nature A physical map of the human Y chromosome CHARLES A. TILFORD, TOMOKO KURODA-KAWAGUCHI, HELEN SKALETSKY, STEVE ROZEN, LAURA G. BROWN, MICHAEL ROSENBERG, JOHN D. MCPHERSON, KRISTINE WYLIE, MANDEEP SEKHON, TAMARA A. KUCABA, ROBERT H. WATERSTON, DAVID C. PAGE Nature 409, 943-945 (15 February 2001) | First Paragraph | Full Text | PDF | cytogenetic map This paper takes a macroscopic view of the genome, visualizing all of the chromosomes. It places 7,500 landmarks across the entire set of chromosomes, like signposts, so that you always know which sector of the genome youre in. Each landmark was mapped to specific bands on the chromosomes using a method where each tag is labelled with a fluorescent dye and then bound to the genome to determine which part of the chromosome it lights up and therefore which position in the genome it corresponds to. This tagging provides a powerful tool for studying human diseases, such as cancer, which are frequently caused by chromosomes breaking in certain places. Researchers can much more rapidly determine which regions are broken and which genes are affected. Indeed, the authors describe how they used their cytogenetic map to track down the region disrupted in a case of mental retardation and identified several strong candidate genes. letter to nature Integration of cytogenetic landmarks into the draft sequence of the human genome B. J. TRASK et al. Nature 409, 953-958 (15 February 2001) | First Paragraph | Full Text | PDF | recombination and the human genome Each of us is composed of two sets of 23 chromosomes and during formation of our sex cells, each pair of chromosomes join together to exchange various homologous regions - thus, each offspring is a unique combination of each parents pairs of chromosomes swapping chunks. The rate of exchange between chromosomes drives our diversity and influences the evolution of our species. With the physical maps and sequence to hand, it is now possible to take a glimpse at the rate at which chromosomes swap with their partners. This reveals that recombination is not uniform across the genome. Rather, our chromosomes are a mixed terrain, with deserts where recombination seemingly happens infrequently, and jungles, where exchange often occurs. Understanding the pattern of recombination across the genome is important for mapping human disease genes because it will influence how these studies are designed. The higher the rate of recombination in a region, the higher density of genetic markers that are needed to determine, at sufficient resolution, whether the region of the genome is inherited with a disease and therefore potentially contains the causative gene aberration. letter to nature Comparison of human genetic and sequence-based physical maps JAMES L. WEBER et al. Nature 409, 951-953 (15 February 2001) | First Paragraph | Full Text | PDF | the map of human variation Most human genetic variation occurs as different nucleotides at single base positions -called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs. The latest map of nucleotide diversity across the human genome, from Altschuler et al., catalogues 1.42 million SNPs across the genome. On average, there is one SNP every 1.9 kilobases. Nucleotide diversity varies greatly across the genome, and the pattern of diversity varies for different populations. This chart of human variation will be crucial for studying complex traits, where subtle changes in one or several genes can lead to the common diseases that affect the human species, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and so on. In addition, mapping the variation in genomes between populations in different nations will help us understand human evolution and migration. article A map of human genome sequence variation containing 1.42 million single nucleotide polymorphisms ALTCHULER et al. Nature 409, 928-933 (15 February 2001) | Summary | Full Text | PDF | news and views Single nucleotide polymorphisms: From the evolutionary past... MARK STONEKING Nature 409, 821-822 (15 February 2001) | Full Text | PDF | news and views ...to a future of genetic medicine ARAVINDA CHAKRAVARTI Nature 409, 822-823 (15 February 2001) | Full Text | PDF | microarray annotation Guessing the number of human genes is a speculative business. Boguski et al. have devised a means of experimentally validating gene predictions and refining the definition of gene structures using microarray technology. As proof of principle, the authors analyse gene predictions for chromosome 22, the first chromosome to be fully sequenced and exhaustively annotated. Although they were able to validate the majority of known genes on chromosome 22q, some were missed, indicating that their algorithms for detecting subtle differences in gene expression need further refinement. But more than half of the gene predictions based solely on ab initio computer predictions were confirmed - far exceeding earlier expectations - illustrating that this is an effective means of quickly assessing the validity of computational predictions. Its a long way from comprehensively defining the structure of every gene in the human genome, but this novel approach offers a rapid means of validating computational predictions and training the next generation of gene-hunting programs. analysis Experimental annotation of the human genome using microarray technology M. S. BOGUSKI et al. Nature 409, 922-927 (15 February 2001) | Summary | Full Text | PDF | what we learn from the sequence Gene number We have many fewer genes than might have been expected for a relatively complex organism. Flies (Drosophila) have 13,000 genes, nematode worms (Caenorhabditis elegans) have 18,000 and thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) has 26,000. From analysis of the human draft genome, there only seem to be 30,000-40,000 genes. Furthermore, the additional genes are not primarily the result of invention of new protein domains. We have many of the same protein families as flies and worms, although we have more in each family. The additional genes come from reshuffling the number and order of protein domains, analogous to making new cars out of old parts. So if the increasing complexity of humans isnt due to a big rise in gene number, what might explain it? It is likely to be an intricate combination of carefully timed gene expression, processing of gene products and modifications of proteins. A repetitious genome More than half of the euchromatic genome is comprised of repeat sequences, with the vast majority (45%) accounted for by repeats derived from parasitic DNA, called 'transposable elements' or 'transposons'. The elements propagate by replicating themselves at one site in the genome and then inserting the copy into another site. This degree of transposition is unprecedented in any other sequenced genome, compared with fly and worm. Curiously, much of our repeat content represents ancient remnants of long-dead transposons, contrasting with the fly and mouse genomes, which harbour younger, more active elements. The type and distribution of the transposable elements in our genome is indicative of the elements that have shaped the evolution of our genome. Some types of transposons seemingly flourish in our genome, such as LINE1 and Alu elements (which represent more than 60% of all interspersed repeat sequences). Others seem to have found the environment unsavoury: for example, only faint traces of LTR retroposons are detectable in the human genome, yet they are alive and kicking in the mouse genome. There is evidence that repeats shaped the evolution of our genome and mediated the creation of new genes. Analysis of the draft genome has brought the total number of genes likely to be derived from transposons to 47, including the genes encoding telomerase and RAG1 and RAG2, the recombinases involved in construction of immune system receptors. Several hundred genes use fragments of transposons in the regulatory sequences that control expression and transcription termination. This suggests that, at least in part, transposons are retained because they confer some advantage. Surprisingly, one of the two most prolific transposable elements found in the human genome, Alu, a type of short interspersed element (SINE), is enriched in the GC-rich regions of the genome where most genes are found. This is purely correlative, but it suggests that Alu elements like to snuggle up to actively transcribed genes and potentially convey some selective advantage, such as that observed to be offered by SINEs in other species that promote protein production in times of stress. But not all transposition is good. Approximately 1 in 600 mutations in humans are the result of transposition and, although most probably have little consequence, some may be detrimental. For example, a transposition event in the APC gene is responsible for a case of colorectal cancer. Segmental duplications Duplications also appear to have had a significant role in genome evolution, with roughly 5% of the sequence arising from duplication of large blocks (of more than 10 kilobases) within and between chromosomes. This is a much more prevalent feature in human than in fly, worm or yeast. Duplications enable one copy of a gene to relocate to a new site where it may take on a distinct physiological function. Highly homologous duplicated regions are likely to have contributed greatly to the expansion of gene families in humans, an extreme example being the large olfactory receptor gene family which comprises more than 1,000 members. But it can also cause problems. Unequal crossing over between large nearly identical regions on the same chromosomes can cause deletions of large chunks of genome, causing disease. An example is DiGeorge syndrome, or velocardiofacial syndrome, which is caused by duplications on chromosome 22, and Williams-Beuren syndrome, which arises from deletions on chromosome 7. Input from bacteria Bacteria have also left their mark on our genome. Remarkably, 223 genes found in human are more similar to bacterial genes than to anything seen in yeast, worm, fly or plants. And they appear to have been transferred from a range of bacterial species. The same genes are found in other vertebrate species, indicating that they were introduced early during the vertebrate lineage. Is this a case of bacterial genes hitchhiking an evolutionary ride, or is there something in it for us? Most of the bacterially inherited genes encode enzymes and these have been sequestered into specific pathways, such as stress responses and metabolism of xenobiotics, indicating that the genes have been adapted to important physiological functions. For example, relatives have been discovered of monoamine oxidase, an enzyme of the mitochondria outer membrane involved in metabolism of neuromediators and is a target of important psychiatric drugs. news and views Our genome unveiled DAVID BALTIMORE Nature 409, 814-816 (15 February 2001) | Full Text | PDF | news and views Genome speak (glossary) PEER BORK, RICHARD COPLEY Nature 409, 815 (15 February 2001) | Full Text | PDF | news and views The draft sequences: Filling in the gaps PEER BORK, RICHARD COPLEY Nature 409, 818-820 (15 February 2001) | Full Text | PDF | news and views The draft sequences: Comparing species GERALD M. RUBIN Nature 409, 820-821 (15 February 2001) | Full Text | PDF | the data-mining reports In a series of reports accompanying the research papers, Nature invited nine experts from different areas of the biological sciences to explore the human genome sequence and see how many genes from specific gene families they could find and what novel insight they could decipher from the sequence. As Birney et al. explain in an accompanying introduction to the data-mining series, a draft genome sequence is a challenging dataset and there are many hurdles to be overcome and things to be wary of when exploring the sequence. clock genes Our daily biological rhythm, or circadian clock, is controlled by genes. They drive our sleep-wake cycle, hormone levels and variations in body temperature. Disturbances in the rhythm of our inner clocks can lead to sleep disorders, poor health and neuropsychiatric disorders. Its also the reason why we suffer jetlag at the end of a long flight. Reppert et al. screened the genome for new clock genes. They found several that may help us understand the genetic basis of our daily rhythm, provide new targets for treating jet lag and sleep disorders, and for deciphering those genes that make some of us early risers and others night owls. analysis Keeping time with the human genome JONATHAN D. CLAYTON, CHARALAMBOS P. KYRIACOU, STEVEN M. REPPERT Nature 409, 829-831 (15 February 2001) | Summary | Full Text | PDF | genetics of addiction A large amount of risk associated with addiction is genetic. Addiction to drugs typically involves changes in the sensitivity of a brain receptor. Nestler and Landsman scoured the human genome for relatives of genes encoding brain receptors that are involved in drug addiction. These findings are likely to improve the understanding of neurological changes associated with addiction and why some of us are more vulnerable to substance abuse than others. analysis Learning about addiction from the genome ERIC J. NESTLER, DAVID LANDSMAN Nature 409, 834-835 (15 February 2001) | Summary | Full Text | PDF | transcription and gene expression Green et al. studied genes involved in the various processes that influence gene expression. They searched for relatives of genes critical to these processes. They found that the increased intricacy in the machinery that controls gene expression is an important reason why humans are more complex than simple creatures such as flies and worms. analysis Expressing the human genome ROSSELLA TUPLER, GIOVANNI PERINI, MICHAEL R. GREEN Nature 409, 832-833 (15 February 2001) | Summary | Full Text | PDF | compartment organization and trafficking Our cells are divided into compartments where different cellular processes take place. Many proteins transiently pass through various compartments en route to their final destinations. The transport system of a cell involves bubble-like vesicles budding off from one compartment and then being trafficked to another. A number of well defined gene products are involved in this transport process. Scheller et al. explore the genome, finding many new members of these families; they also more clearly define distinct subgroups within families. analysis A genomic perspective on membrane compartment organization JASON B. BOCK, HUGO T. MATERN, ANDREW A. PEDEN, RICHARD H. SCHELLER Nature 409, 839-841 (15 February 2001) | Summary | Full Text | PDF | cytoskeleton and motility The cytoskeleton shuttles proteins around the interior of a cell. It is made of actin filaments, intermediate filaments and microtubules. Myosin proteins move cargo along the actin filament conveyor belts; dynein and kinesin motors drive movement along the microtubules. Pollard hunted for new proteins of the cytoskeleton that are encoded by the genome sequence. The author tapped into a set of molecular targets for treating cardiovascular and skeletal muscle disorders, which can often involve disruption of the cells scaffold and contractile motors. analysis Genomics, the cytoskeleton and motility THOMAS D. POLLARD Nature 409, 842-843 (15 February 2001) | Summary | Full Text | PDF | evolutionary analyses Li et al. examine repeats, the sharing and conservation of domains between species and duplications in the context of how this has influenced human evolution and how we differ from flies, worms and yeast. They conclude that most of our genome is composed of repeats - repeats that drive the evolution of new genes, because duplication of regions of the genome is another route to expansion of gene families. They also conclude that we share many common protein domains with other species but that our increase in gene number seems to be derived from unusual ways of mixing and matching the same domains rather than creating novel domains. analysis Evolutionary analyses of the human genome WEN-HSIUNG LI, ZHENGLONG GU, HAIDONG WANG, ANTON NEKRUTENKO Nature 409, 847-849 (15 February 2001) | Summary | Full Text | PDF | immunology Fahrer et al. look for new members of three examples of immunologically important proteins: the tumour-necrosis factors receptor family, the B7 family of costimulatory proteins and cytokines. They find new candidates that potentially reveal new regulators and mediators of the immune system that underpin immunological traits and treatments for aberrations of the immune system. analysis A genomic view of immunology AUDE M. FAHRER, J. FERNANDO BAZAN, PETER PAPATHANASIOU, KEATS A. NELMS, CHRISTOPHER C. GOODNOW Nature 409, 836-838 (15 February 2001) | Summary | Full Text | PDF | cell cycling The cell cycle is an intricate choreography of cellular processes including DNA replication, segregation of the chromosomes and cell division. The cell cycle is governed by the activity of cyclins and cyclin-dependent kinases. The search of Murray et al. for relatives of these proteins reveals how amazingly conserved multicellular organisms are, from flies to humans, in using the same machinery to regulate the cell cycle. analysis Can sequencing shed light on cell cycling? ANDREW W. MURRAY, DEBORA MARKS Nature 409, 844-846 (15 February 2001) | Summary | Full Text | PDF | cancer Cancer isnt typically caused by a single mutation - rather, it is large-scale genome meltdown, with chromosomes snapped in places, whole chunks rearranged, some bits lost and others duplicated. Stratton et al.s perusal of the draft genome sequence did not reveal any new relatives of the infamous cancer genes, such as p53. But they did find that comparing the genomes from cancerous cells with that of the normal reference human genome sequence can uncover new genes involved in the major rearrangements of chromosomes that contribute to cancer. analysis Cancer and genomics P. ANDREW FUTREAL, AREK KASPRZYK, EWAN BIRNEY, JAMES C. MULLIKIN, RICHARD WOOSTER, MICHAEL R. STRATTON Nature 409, 850-852 (15 February 2001) | Summary | Full Text | PDF | human disease genes From analysis of a compilation of nearly 1,000 disease genes, Valle et al. show that most (just over 30%) of inherited diseases caused by a single gene defect are associated with genes that encode enzymes. Overall, they find strong correlations with the function of the gene and the features of the disease, including age of onset and pattern of inheritance. Specifically, each of the four functional categories defined have a different peak age at onset: transcription factors in utero, enzymes by one year, receptors between year one and puberty and modifiers of protein function in early adulthood. analysis Human disease genes GERARDO JIMENEZ-SANCHEZ, BARTON CHILDS, DAVID VALLE Nature 409, 853-855 (15 February 2001) | Summary | Full Text | PDF |
Science -- Human genomeThe special issue on the first draft of the human genome.
Science AAAS | Table of Contents: 16 February 2001; 291 (5507) Jump to: Page Content , Section Navigation , Site Navigation , Site Search , Account Information , or Site Tools . You are seeing this message because your web browser does not support basic web standards. Find out more about why this message is appearing and what you can do to make your experience on this site better. Site Tools Site Search Site Area Science Magazine News STKE SAGE KE Science Careers All HighWire Journals Terms Advanced Account Information JOZEF STEFAN INSTITUT Alerts | Access Rights | My Account | Sign In Site Navigation Readers Members Authors Librarians Advertisers Current Issue Previous Issues Science Express Science Products My Science About the Journal Home Science Magazine 16 February 2001 Page Content Prev Issue | Next Issue About the Cover 16 February 2001 Vol 291, Issue 5507, Pages 1145-1434 Special Issue This Week in Science Editorial Editors' Choice News Focus Books et al. Tech.Sight Reports Author Index Subject Index Set E-Mail Alerts Order an Issue Article RSS Feeds Search the Journal Enter Keyword Select Issue This issue only All issues Issue Highlights Human Genome Special Issue: Free Access to All Users Editorial Overview The Human Genome Sequence The Story Behind the Genome (with Timeline ) How to Access the Data Special Issue For all checked items The Human Genome Viewpoints THE HUMAN GENOME: Science Genome Map Science 16 February 2001: 1218. Summary | Full Text | GENOMICS AND SOCIETY: The Human Genome and Our View of Ourselves Svante Pbo Science 16 February 2001: 1219-1220. Summary | Full Text | PROTEOMICS: Proteomics in Genomeland Stanley Fields Science 16 February 2001: 1221-1224. Summary | Full Text | GENOMICS AND MEDICINE: Dissecting Human Disease in the Postgenomic Era Leena Peltonen and Victor A. McKusick Science 16 February 2001: 1224-1229. Summary | Full Text | GENOMICS AND BEHAVIOR: Toward Behavioral Genomics Peter McGuffin, Brien Riley, and Robert Plomin Science 16 February 2001: 1232-1249. Summary | Full Text | POLICY ISSUES: Political Issues in the Genome Era James M. Jeffords and Tom Daschle Science 16 February 2001: 1249-1251. Summary | Full Text | SEQUENCE INTERPRETATION: Functional Annotation of Mouse Genome Sequences Joseph H. Nadeau, Rudi Balling, Greg Barsh, David Beier, S. D. M. Brown, Maja Bucan, Sally Camper, George Carlson, Neal Copeland, Janan Eppig, Colin Fletcher, Wayne N. Frankel, Detlev Ganten, Dan Goldowitz, Chris Goodnow, Jean-Louis Guenet, Geoff Hicks, Martin Hrabe de Angelis, Ian Jackson, Howard J. Jacob, Nancy Jenkins, Dabney Johnson, Monica Justice, Steve Kay, David Kingsley, Hans Lehrach, Terry Magnuson, Miriam Meisler, AnneMarie Poustka, Eugene M. Rinchik, Janet Rossant, Lee B. Russell, John Schimenti, Toshihiko Shiroishi, William C. Skarnes, Phil Soriano, William Stanford, Joseph S. Takahashi, Wolfgang Wurst, and Andreas Zimmer Science 16 February 2001: 1251-1255. Summary | Full Text | GENE NUMBER: What If There Are Only 30,000 Human Genes? Jean-Michel Claverie Science 16 February 2001: 1255-1257. Summary | Full Text | SEQUENCE INTERPRETATION: Making Sense of the Sequence David J. Galas Science 16 February 2001: 1257-1260. Summary | Full Text | COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY: Bioinformatics--Trying to Swim in a Sea of Data David S. Roos Science 16 February 2001: 1260-1261. Summary | Full Text | Review The Sequence of the Human Genome J. Craig Venter, Mark D. Adams, Eugene W. Myers, Peter W. Li, Richard J. Mural, Granger G. Sutton, Hamilton O. Smith, Mark Yandell, Cheryl A. Evans, Robert A. Holt, Jeannine D. Gocayne, Peter Amanatides, Richard M. Ballew, Daniel H. Huson, Jennifer Russo Wortman, Qing Zhang, Chinnappa D. Kodira, Xiangqun H. Zheng, Lin Chen, Marian Skupski, Gangadharan Subramanian, Paul D. Thomas, Jinghui Zhang, George L. Gabor Miklos, Catherine Nelson, Samuel Broder, Andrew G. Clark, Joe Nadeau, Victor A. McKusick, Norton Zinder, Arnold J. Levine, Richard J. Roberts, Mel Simon, Carolyn Slayman, Michael Hunkapiller, Randall Bolanos, Arthur Delcher, Ian Dew, Daniel Fasulo, Michael Flanigan, Liliana Florea, Aaron Halpern, Sridhar Hannenhalli, Saul Kravitz, Samuel Levy, Clark Mobarry, Knut Reinert, Karin Remington, Jane Abu-Threideh, Ellen Beasley, Kendra Biddick, Vivien Bonazzi, Rhonda Brandon, Michele Cargill, Ishwar Chandramouliswaran, Rosane Charlab, Kabir Chaturvedi, Zuoming Deng, Valentina Di Francesco, Patrick Dunn, Karen Eilbeck, Carlos Evangelista, Andrei E. Gabrielian, Weiniu Gan, Wangmao Ge, Fangcheng Gong, Zhiping Gu, Ping Guan, Thomas J. Heiman, Maureen E. Higgins, Rui-Ru Ji, Zhaoxi Ke, Karen A. Ketchum, Zhongwu Lai, Yiding Lei, Zhenya Li, Jiayin Li, Yong Liang, Xiaoying Lin, Fu Lu, Gennady V. Merkulov, Natalia Milshina, Helen M. Moore, Ashwinikumar K Naik, Vaibhav A. Narayan, Beena Neelam, Deborah Nusskern, Douglas B. Rusch, Steven Salzberg, Wei Shao, Bixiong Shue, Jingtao Sun, Zhen Yuan Wang, Aihui Wang, Xin Wang, Jian Wang, Ming-Hui Wei, Ron Wides, Chunlin Xiao, Chunhua Yan, Alison Yao, Jane Ye, Ming Zhan, Weiqing Zhang, Hongyu Zhang, Qi Zhao, Liansheng Zheng, Fei Zhong, Wenyan Zhong, Shiaoping C. Zhu, Shaying Zhao, Dennis Gilbert, Suzanna Baumhueter, Gene Spier, Christine Carter, Anibal Cravchik, Trevor Woodage, Feroze Ali, Huijin An, Aderonke Awe, Danita Baldwin, Holly Baden, Mary Barnstead, Ian Barrow, Karen Beeson, Dana Busam, Amy Carver, Angela Center, Ming Lai Cheng, Liz Curry, Steve Danaher, Lionel Davenport, Raymond Desilets, Susanne Dietz, Kristina Dodson, Lisa Doup, Steven Ferriera, Neha Garg, Andres Gluecksmann, Brit Hart, Jason Haynes, Charles Haynes, Cheryl Heiner, Suzanne Hladun, Damon Hostin, Jarrett Houck, Timothy Howland, Chinyere Ibegwam, Jeffery Johnson, Francis Kalush, Lesley Kline, Shashi Koduru, Amy Love, Felecia Mann, David May, Steven McCawley, Tina McIntosh, Ivy McMullen, Mee Moy, Linda Moy, Brian Murphy, Keith Nelson, Cynthia Pfannkoch, Eric Pratts, Vinita Puri, Hina Qureshi, Matthew Reardon, Robert Rodriguez, Yu-Hui Rogers, Deanna Romblad, Bob Ruhfel, Richard Scott, Cynthia Sitter, Michelle Smallwood, Erin Stewart, Renee Strong, Ellen Suh, Reginald Thomas, Ni Ni Tint, Sukyee Tse, Claire Vech, Gary Wang, Jeremy Wetter, Sherita Williams, Monica Williams, Sandra Windsor, Emily Winn-Deen, Keriellen Wolfe, Jayshree Zaveri, Karena Zaveri, Josep F. Abril, Roderic Guig, Michael J. Campbell, Kimmen V. Sjolander, Brian Karlak, Anish Kejariwal, Huaiyu Mi, Betty Lazareva, Thomas Hatton, Apurva Narechania, Karen Diemer, Anushya Muruganujan, Nan Guo, Shinji Sato, Vineet Bafna, Sorin Istrail, Ross Lippert, Russell Schwartz, Brian Walenz, Shibu Yooseph, David Allen, Anand Basu, James Baxendale, Louis Blick, Marcelo Caminha, John Carnes-Stine, Parris Caulk, Yen-Hui Chiang, My Coyne, Carl Dahlke, Anne Deslattes Mays, Maria Dombroski, Michael Donnelly, Dale Ely, Shiva Esparham, Carl Fosler, Harold Gire, Stephen Glanowski, Kenneth Glasser, Anna Glodek, Mark Gorokhov, Ken Graham, Barry Gropman, Michael Harris, Jeremy Heil, Scott Henderson, Jeffrey Hoover, Donald Jennings, Catherine Jordan, James Jordan, John Kasha, Leonid Kagan, Cheryl Kraft, Alexander Levitsky, Mark Lewis, Xiangjun Liu, John Lopez, Daniel Ma, William Majoros, Joe McDaniel, Sean Murphy, Matthew Newman, Trung Nguyen, Ngoc Nguyen, Marc Nodell, Sue Pan, Jim Peck, Marshall Peterson, William Rowe, Robert Sanders, John Scott, Michael Simpson, Thomas Smith, Arlan Sprague, Timothy Stockwell, Russell Turner, Eli Venter, Mei Wang, Meiyuan Wen, David Wu, Mitchell Wu, Ashley Xia, Ali Zandieh, and Xiaohong Zhu Science 16 February 2001: 1304-1351. Abstract | Full Text | PDF | Supplemental Data | Web Fig. 1 | Japanese Language PDF | Contents For all checked items This Week in Science Editor summaries of this week's papers. Science 16 February 2001: 1155. | Full Text Editorial: The Human Genome Barbara R. Jasny and Donald Kennedy Science 16 February 2001: 1153. Summary | Editors' Choice Highlights of the recent literature. Science 16 February 2001: 1159. | Full Text NetWatch Best of the Web in science. Science 16 February 2001: 1163. | Full Text NEW PRODUCTS Science 16 February 2001: 1367-1369. News Focus The Human Genome Elizabeth Pennisi Science 16 February 2001: 1177-1180. Summary | Full Text | Comparison Shopping Eliot Marshall Science 16 February 2001: 1180-1181. Summary | Full Text | Watching Genes Build a Body Gretchen Vogel Science 16 February 2001: 1181. Summary | Full Text | Controversial From the Start Leslie Roberts Science 16 February 2001: 1182-1188. Summary | Full Text | Objection 1: Big Biology Is Bad Biology Robert F. Service Science 16 February 2001: 1182. Summary | Full Text | Finding the Talismans That Protect Against Infection Martin Enserink Science 16 February 2001: 1183. Summary | Full Text | Objection 2: Why Sequence the Junk? Gretchen Vogel Science 16 February 2001: 1184. Summary | Full Text | Nailing Down Cancer Culprits Jean Marx Science 16 February 2001: 1185. Summary | Full Text | Objection 3: Impossible to Do Robert F. Service Science 16 February 2001: 1186. Summary | Full Text | A Parakeet Genome Project? Gretchen Vogel Science 16 February 2001: 1187. Summary | Full Text | Brain Calls Dibs on Many Genes Laura Helmuth Science 16 February 2001: 1188. Summary | Full Text | Sharing the Glory, Not the Credit Eliot Marshall Science 16 February 2001: 1189-1193. Summary | Full Text | Celera and Science Spell Out Data Access Provisions Eliot Marshall Science 16 February 2001: 1191. Summary | Full Text | Bermuda Rules: Community Spirit, With Teeth Eliot Marshall Science 16 February 2001: 1192. Summary | Full Text | Genomania Meets the Bottom Line David Malakoff and Robert F. Service Science 16 February 2001: 1193-1203. Summary | Full Text | Will a Smaller Genome Complicate the Patent Chase? David Malakoff Science 16 February 2001: 1194. Summary | Full Text | A History of the Human Genome Project Leslie Roberts, R. John Davenport, Elizabeth Pennisi, and Eliot Marshall Science 9 February 2001: 1195. Summary | Full Text | In Their Own Words Science 9 February 2001: 1196. Summary | Full Text | A Genome Glossary Laura Helmuth Science 9 February 2001: 1197. Summary | Full Text | Can Data Banks Tally Profits? Robert F. Service Science 16 February 2001: 1203. Summary | Full Text | What's Next for the Genome Centers? Elizabeth Pennisi Science 16 February 2001: 1204-1207. Summary | Full Text | Hunting for Collaborators of Killer Toxins Jocelyn Kaiser Science 16 February 2001: 1207. Summary | Full Text | Unsung Heroes Science 16 February 2001: 1207. Summary | Full Text | Books et al. MOLECULAR BIOLOGY: In the Beginning Was the Word R. C. Lewontin Science 16 February 2001: 1263-1264. Summary | Full Text | GENETICS: Communication Breakdown? Sean B. Carroll Science 16 February 2001: 1264-1265. Summary | Full Text | GENOMICS: Hunting the Metaphor Sydney Brenner Science 16 February 2001: 1265-1266. Summary | Full Text | Books Received Science 16 February 2001: 1265. Tech.Sight Worth Its Weight in Gold Moise Bendayan Science 16 February 2001: 1363-1365. Summary | Full Text | Reports Apoptotic Molecular Machinery: Vastly Increased Complexity in Vertebrates Revealed by Genome Comparisons L. Aravind, Vishva M. Dixit, and Eugene V. Koonin Science 16 February 2001: 1279-1284. Abstract | Full Text | PDF | Human DNA Repair Genes Richard D. Wood, Michael Mitchell, John Sgouros, and Tomas Lindahl Science 16 February 2001: 1284-1289. Abstract | Full Text | PDF | Supplemental Data | The Human Transcriptome Map: Clustering of Highly Expressed Genes in Chromosomal Domains Huib Caron, Barbera van Schaik, Merlijn van der Mee, Frank Baas, Gregory Riggins, Peter van Sluis, Marie-Christine Hermus, Ronald van Asperen, Kathy Boon, P. A. Vote, Siem Heisterkamp, Antoine van Kampen, and Rogier Versteeg Science 16 February 2001: 1289-1292. Abstract | Full Text | PDF | Supplemental Data | Birth of Two Chimeric Genes in the Hominidae Lineage Anouk Courseaux and Jean-Louis Nahon Science 16 February 2001: 1293-1297. Abstract | Full Text | PDF | A High-Resolution Radiation Hybrid Map of the Human Genome Draft Sequence Michael Olivier, Amita Aggarwal, Jennifer Allen, Annalisa A. Almendras, Eva S. Bajorek, Ellen M. Beasley, Shannon D. Brady, Jannette M. Bushard, Valerie I. Bustos, Angela Chu, Tisha R. Chung, Anniek De Witte, Mirian E. Denys, Rakly Dominguez, Nicole Y. Fang, Brian D. Foster, Robert W. Freudenberg, David Hadley, Libby R. Hamilton, Tonya J. Jeffrey, Libusha Kelly, Laura Lazzeroni, Michelle R. Levy, Saskia C. Lewis, Xia Liu, Frederick J. Lopez, Brent Louie, Joseph P. Marquis, Robert A. Martinez, Margaret K. Matsuura, Nedda S. Misherghi, Jolanna A. Norton, Adam Olshen, Shanti M. Perkins, Amy J. Perou, Chris Piercy, Mark Piercy, Fawn Qin, Tim Reif, Kelly Sheppard, Vida Shokoohi, Geoff A. Smick, Wei-Lin Sun, Elizabeth A. Stewart, J. Fernando, Tejeda, Nguyet M. Tran, Tonatiuh Trejo, Nu T. Vo, Simon C.M. Yan, Deborah L. Zierten, Shaying Zhao, Ravi Sachidanandam, Barbara J. Trask, Richard M. Myers, and David R. Cox Science 16 February 2001: 1298-1302. 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The cognitive skills of NeanderthalsNeanderthals were predators.
From the Cover: Neanderthal diet at Vindija and Neanderthal predation: The evidence from stable isotopes -- Richards et al. 97 (13): 7663 -- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Published online before print June 13, 2000, 10.1073 pnas.120178997 PNAS | June 20, 2000 | vol. 97 | no. 13 | 7663-7666 This Article Abstract Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Citation Map Services Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in ISI Web of Science Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to My File Cabinet Download to citation manager Cited by other online articles Search for citing articles in: ISI Web of Science (49) Request Copyright Permission Google Scholar Articles by Richards, M. P. Articles by Karavani , I. Articles citing this Article PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Richards, M. P. Articles by Karavani , I. From the Cover Anthropology Neanderthal diet at Vindija and Neanderthal predation: The evidence from stable isotopes Michael P. Richards*, , Paul B. Pettitt*, , Erik Trinkaus,, , Fred H. Smith**, Maja Paunovi , and Ivor Karavani *Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, University of Oxford, 6Keble Road, Oxford OX1 3QJ, United Kingdom; Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6, Canada; Keble College, Oxford OX1 3PG, United Kingdom; Department of Anthropology, Campus Box 1114,Washington University, St. Louis MO 63130; Unit Mixte de Recherche 5809du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Laboratoire d'Anthropologie, Universit de Bordeaux I, 33405Talence, France; **Department of Anthropology, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60115; Zavod za paleontologiju i geologiju kvartara, Hrvatske akademije znanosti i umjetnosti, Ulica A.Kova i a 5 II, HR-10000 Zagreb, Croatia; and Arheolo ki zavod Filozofskog fakulteta Sveu ili ta u Zagrebu, I.Lu i a 3,HR-10000 Zagreb, Croatia Contributed by Erik Trinkaus, April 19,2000 Abstract Top Abstract Introduction Summary and Conclusions References Archeological analysis of faunal remains and of lithic and bone tools has suggested that hunting of medium to large mammals was a major element of Neanderthal subsistence. Plant foods are almost invisible in the archeological record, and it is impossible to estimate accurately their dietary importance. However, stable isotope ( 13C and 15N) analysis of mammal bone collagen provides a direct measure of diet and has been applied to two Neanderthals and various faunal species from Vindija Cave, Croatia. The isotope evidence overwhelmingly points to the Neanderthals behaving as top-level carnivores, obtaining almost all of their dietary protein from animal sources. Earlier Neanderthals in France and Belgium have yielded similar results, and a pattern of European Neanderthal adaptation as carnivores is emerging. These data reinforce current taphonomic assessments of associated faunal elements and make it unlikely that the Neanderthals were acquiring animal protein principally through scavenging. Instead, these findings portray them as effective predators. paleodiet | Croatia | Europe | 13C | 15N Introduction Top Abstract Introduction Summary and Conclusions References Reconstructions of European Neanderthal subsistence strategies have overwhelmingly focused on the specialized hunting and scavenging of herbivores as the predominant method of obtaining food ( 1-6 ). These reconstructions are based principally on the analysis of the abundantly preserved faunal remains, supplemented by artifactual evidence of lithic and wood hunting apparatuses, as well as on the relative importance of the faunal biomass in the environments that European Neanderthals occupied during later oxygen isotope stage 5and especially oxygen isotope stages 4and 3of the Late Pleistocene. Understanding Neanderthal diet has implications for understanding Neanderthal land use, social organization, and behavioral complexity. Yet despite the abundant evidence for successful hunting techniques across Neanderthal Eurasia, faunal remains can indicate only hunting or scavenging episodes; they cannot tell us about the predominant foods in the diet over the long term. By contrast, the measurement of the ratios of the stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in mammal bone collagen provides an indication of aspects of diet over the last few years of life ( 7-9 ). This stable isotope evidence can therefore provide us with direct information on Neanderthal diet. This method has been applied to Neanderthal remains from the sites of Marillac, France ( 10 ), and Scladina Cave, Belgium ( 11 ). These studies, focusing particularly on their high 15N values, indicated that the Neanderthals measured occupied the top trophic level, obtaining nearly all of their dietary protein from animal sources. In the context of this finding, we undertook stable isotope analyses of the two late Neanderthal specimens from Vindija Cave, in the Hrvatsko Zagorje of northern Croatia [Vi-207 and Vi-208 ( 12 )], and of the fauna with which they were stratigraphically associated. Vindija Neanderthal and Faunal Specimens. Recently, the Vi-207 and Vi-208 Neanderthal specimens, as well as various other archeological materials from level G1 of Vindija Cave, Croatia, were submitted for accelerator mass spectrometer radiocarbon dating at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, University of Oxford ( 13 ). The two Neanderthal specimens were dated to 29,080400years before present (B.P.) (OxA-8296, Vi-207) and 28,020360years B.P. (OxA-8295, Vi-208), making them the youngest directly dated Neanderthal specimens in Europe ( 13 ). Because the radiocarbon sample preparation process includes assessments of stable isotopes, in part to control for potential contamination, this analysis also yielded stable isotope profiles for these late archaic humans. Combined with similar data obtained from faunal remains from level G1 and the older level G3 of Vindija Cave, this provides a means of assessing the dietary profiles of these Neanderthals. Stable Isotope Analyses. Mammal bone collagen 13C and 15N values reflect the 13C and 15N values of dietary protein ( 14 ). They furnish a long-term record of diet, giving the average 13C and 15N values of all of the protein consumed over the last years of the measured individual's life. 13C values can be used to discriminate between terrestrial and marine dietary protein in humans and other mammals ( 15 , 16 ). In addition, because of the canopy effect, species that live in forest environments can have 13C values that are more negative than species that live in open environments ( 17 ). 15N values are, on average, 2-4 higher than the average 15N value of the protein consumed ( 18 ). Therefore, 15N values can be used to determine the trophic level of the protein consumed. By measuring the 13C and 15N values of various fauna in a paleo-ecosystem, it is possible to reconstruct the trophic level relationships within that ecosystem. Therefore, by comparing the 13C and 15N values of omnivores such as hominids with the values of herbivores and carnivores from the same ecosystem, it is possible to determine whether those omnivores were obtaining dietary protein from plant or animal sources. Vindija Neanderthal and Faunal Isotope Values. Collagen was extracted from the two Neanderthal specimens from level G1 of Vindija Cave and from various faunal remains from level G1 and the older level G3 according to standard collagen extraction procedures; the Neanderthal specimens were extracted according to the methods outlined in Law and Hedges ( 19 ), and the faunal specimens were extracted according to the procedure outlined in Richards and Hedges ( 16 ). The collagen extracts varied in quality, and only those samples that had acceptable collagen attributes were used. These attributes are based on values determined by DeNiro ( 20 ) and Ambrose ( 21 ) and used by the majority of stable isotope researchers and radiocarbon dating labs. The acceptable values are a C:N ratio between 2.9and 3.6,"percent collagen" 1%, and %C and %N in the extracted collagen of 13% for carbon and 5% for nitrogen. These collagen attributes allow us to identify and exclude collagen that is heavily degraded or contaminated. This is in contrast to stable isotope measurements of bioapatite in bone mineral and enamel, where no such criteria exist. The stable isotope values and various collagen attributes are given in Table 1 ; based on these, we are confident that the collagen 13C and 15N values reported here are robust and reflect the organisms' original collagen 13C and 15N values. The Neanderthal samples were measured at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, and the faunal samples were measured at the Stable Isotope Laboratory, Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, University of Oxford. View this table: [in this window] [in a new window] Table 1. Bone collagen 13C and 15N values of Neanderthals and associated fauna from Vindija Cave, Croatia We used the ecosystem approach and compared the omnivores of interest, in this case the Neanderthals, with the isotope values of temporally and geographically associated fauna. Unfortunately, it was possible to extract collagen from only a few of the faunal samples taken from Vindija. A particular problem was our inability to extract collagen from our carnivore samples. For this reason, we have supplemented the Vindija faunal sample with data from the slightly later ( 23,000-26,000 B.P.) sites of Doln V stonice II and Milovice in the Czech Republic ( 22 ). In addition, we have contributed a single herbivore sample from the site of Brno-Francouzsk, which dates within this time range ( 23 ). There are fluctuations in faunal 15N values through time that are correlated with climate changes ( 24 , 25 ). For example, Richards et al. ( 26 ) observed faunal 15N values dated to 12,000 years B.P. from Gough's Cave, U.K. that were 2 lower than the 15N values of similar species from the Holocene. Therefore, comparing isotope values between sites, especially sites of different ages, could be problematic. However, by employing fauna that are as geographically and temporally as close to our samples as possible, we should be providing an appropriate comparative framework for the Vindija Neanderthal samples. Moreover, the relative distribution, especially of 15N values, for the species included in this pooled sample is similar to the distributions derived for various faunal species from single sites ( 10 , 11 ). Fauna. The Bos Bison and cervid samples from Vindija (Table 1 ) have herbivore 13C and 15N values that are within the ranges observed for European Holocene specimens ( 25 , 27 ). The 13C values are more indicative of open-ranging species ( 20 ), rather than forest-dwelling species ( 22 ), but ranges of variation in Late Pleistocene Bos Bison 13C values ( 24 ) as well as the hilly terrain in the vicinity of Vindija Cave make it difficult to assess which of these bovine genera is most likely represented. The cave bear samples are interesting from a paleobiological, rather than an anthropological, perspective as they have very low 15N values. Similarly low Ursus spelaeus 15N values have been observed for samples from Slovenia ( 28 ), France ( 29 ), and Belgium ( 30 ). The low U.spelaeus values probably reflect a high degree of herbivory ( 31 ); they may also be a result of their unusual metabolism related to hibernation ( 32 ), although the hibernation model has been disputed ( 30 ). Neanderthals. The Neanderthal samples from Vindija have high 15N values, which indicate that the overwhelming majority of their dietary protein was from animal, rather than plant, sources (Table 1 , Fig. 1 ). The associated 13C values indicate the exploitation of more open-ranging herbivores, despite the hilly terrain of the Hrvatsko Zagorje. The Neanderthal values are close to the later carnivore isotope values from Doln V stonice II and Milovice ( 22 ), as well as those of earlier carnivores from Marillac and Scladina ( 10 , 11 ), indicating that these Neanderthals had diets similar to nonhuman carnivores. View larger version (14K): [in this window] [in a new window] Fig. 1. Bone collagen 13C and 15N values of Neanderthals and associated fauna from Vindija Cave, Croatia (Vi), dated to 28,500 years B.P. Included is a single faunal value from the site of Brno-Francouzsk (Br), Czech Republic ( 24,000 years B.P.). Also plotted are faunal values from Ambrose ( 22 ) from 22,000-26,000 years B.P. sites in the Czech Republic: Doln V stonice II (Dv) and Milovice (Ml). The insufficient associated faunal samples make it impossible to identify which herbivore species were preferentially being consumed by the Neanderthals. The mammoth 15N values from Milovice are intriguing, as they are higher than the other herbivores. This pattern of higher mammoth values has been observed previously ( 30 , 33 , 34 ) and may relate to mammoths targeting specific plant species, whereas other herbivores consume a wider range of species. The higher mammoth 15N values may be of relevance here, as the Neanderthal 15N values could make sense if their main dietary protein source was mammoths rather than the other faunal species. However, archeological evidence for Neanderthal exploitation of proboscideans is extremely rare, and a broader series of fauna needs to be analyzed before the spectrum of predated herbivores can be evaluated through stable isotope analysis. Our findings concerning the diet of the Vindija Neanderthals are remarkably similar to those observed by Bocherens and colleagues for other European Neanderthals ( 10 , 11 ). They obtained similar 13C and 15N values for two Neanderthals from the site of Marillac dated to 40,000-45,000 years B.P. and for a Neanderthal specimen from Scladina Cave, Belgium, which is earlier, dated to between 80,000and 130,000years B.P. (Table 2 ). Moreover, the high 15N for the Marillac Neanderthal remains are most closely approached by the values for Canis lupus and Crocuta crocuta from that site ( 10 ), whereas the earlier Neanderthal 15N value from Scladina is most closely approached in that site's faunal assemblage by Panthera spelaea and secondarily by slightly lower values for Crocuta crocuta and Canis lupus ( 11 ). For these five Neanderthal specimens, therefore, we have stable isotope data indicating that geographically and chronologically dispersed Neanderthals consistently behaved as top-level carnivores. View this table: [in this window] [in a new window] Table 2. Isotope values of Neanderthals from Marillac, France ( 10 ), and Scladina, Belgium ( 11 ) Neanderthals as Predators. Neanderthal subsistence strategies were varied in space and time, with carcass utilization patterns varying on intersite and interspecies levels ( 4 , 35 ). The role of hunting versus scavenging in meat acquisition by Middle Paleolithic humans has been debated particularly over the last two decades ( 3 , 36 , 37 ), and from this discussion it has become clear that the Neanderthals were capable of, and frequently engaged in, predation on mammals. In particular, taphonomic analyses of a number of Middle Paleolithic, Neanderthal-associated mammalian faunal assemblages in recent years have concluded that focused and selective hunting strategies resulting in high meat utility acquisition were carried out by these late archaic humans in areas of Europe and the Near East as dispersed as France (Bau de l'Aubesier, La Borde, Canalettes, Coudoulous, Mauran, Le Portel), Germany (Salzgitter Lebenstedt, Wallertheim), Italy (Grotta Breuil), Croatia (Krapina), Iran (Kobeh), Israel (Kebara), and Russia (Il'skaja) ( 1-3 , 6 , 35 , 38-44 ). These interpretations are based principally on mortality profiles and or distributions of skeletal part frequencies of the prey species being processed, combined with direct evidence of human carcass processing with lithic tools. In the former, prime age-dominated assemblages are usually taken to indicate selective and active predation by these hominids. In the latter, a proximal limb element-dominated assemblage or a preserved skeletal distribution representative of anatomical frequencies, as opposed to a head and foot-dominated assemblage, are generally taken to indicate primary carcass access and hence active predation. However, not only do a significant number of these assemblages not meet both criteria for active predation on the part of the Neanderthals, it is increasingly apparent that a variety of factors can contribute to the mortality and skeletal element distributions documented in archeological faunal assemblages. These factors include prey population demographic dynamics, nonhuman predator prey selection patterns, carcass consumption patterns by both humans and other carnivores, human carcass element transport variation, and postdepositional processes acting differentially on skeletal elements. Moreover, it remains unclear how representative of overall Neanderthal diet such episodes are. Consequently, current taphonomic analyses of these and other archeological faunal assemblages do not always permit assessment of the degrees to which the assemblages were accumulated through active predation versus scavenging. Neanderthal predation has also been supported by the evidence for spears (stone-tipped and wooden) among both the Neanderthals and their Middle Pleistocene European predecessors ( 45-49 ), combined with rare examples of such weapons in the remains of apparent prey animals [e.g., the wooden spear in the ribs of an Elephas skeleton at Lehringen, Germany, and the Levallois point embedded an Equus cervical vertebra from Umm el Tlel in Syria ( 45 , 50 )]. In addition, indirect measures of Neanderthal subsistence such as the Levallois point to core frequencies have been used to suggest that the Neanderthals were highly predatory in the Near East (ref. 51 ; but see refs. 52 and 53 ), despite the absence of evidence for the kind of projectile weaponry seen in the Upper Paleolithic that would increase the mechanical efficiency and safety of hunting or for the patterned variance in extractive technologies widely seen in Upper Paleolithic and more recent hunter-gatherer toolkits ( 54 ). This inference of active predation on the part of the Neanderthals is further supported by their anatomical distribution of trauma, which suggests proximate encounters with large animals ( 55 ) of the kind necessitated by their predominantly heavy available weaponry ( 45 , 47 , 48 , 56 ). Yet, their pattern of trauma does not permit distinctions between injuries sustained during hunting versus those suffered in competition with other carnivores for carcasses or space. Consequently, although several lines of evidence support active mammalian predation by the Neanderthals and contradict the previous models of the Neanderthals acquiring their animal protein principally through scavenging, the archeological data nonetheless remain frequently ambiguous as to the extent to which these late archaic humans were the primary predators of the mammals whose remains they processed. The consistent stable isotope data indicating their position as top-level carnivores provides insight into this issue. There are no true mammalian scavengers, as all are omnivores (ursids and canids) and or actively hunt (hyenas) ( 57 ). This is because the search time for scavenging relative to the return is too expensive for terrestrial homeothermic vertebrates, and most predators actively defend their kills, thereby increasing risk to any potential terrestrial scavenger ( 57 ). If the Neanderthals were obtaining their animal protein principally through scavenging, they would have had to obtain most of their food from plants, as a reliable food source, and only supplemented this with scavenged animal products. Even though the isotope data cannot distinguish the species or even the sizes of the animals consumed, they clearly show that animal products were the overwhelming source of protein in European Neanderthal diets and that protein from plants was insignificant. It is therefore likely that scavenging, although undoubtedly practiced on an opportunistic basis by these European Neanderthals, must have been distinctly secondary to predation. Summary and Conclusions Top Abstract Introduction Summary and Conclusions References Isotope analyses of two Neanderthals and associated fauna from Vindija Cave, Croatia, have indicated that the bulk of their dietary protein came from animal sources. Comparison with faunal remains from this and other sites of similar age indicates that the Vindija Neanderthal isotope values were similar to those of other carnivores. These results are very close to the results for earlier Late Pleistocene Neanderthals from France and Belgium. Therefore, the emerging picture of the European Neanderthal diet indicates that although physiologically they were presumably omnivores, they behaved as carnivores, with animal protein being the main source of dietary protein. This finding is in agreement with the indirect archeological evidence and strongly points to the Neanderthals having been active predators. Acknowledgements We thank H.Bocherens, F.B.Marshall, and M.C.Stiner for helpful comments. The collection and analysis of the Vindija hominid samples was supported by the L.S.B.Leakey Foundation, by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and by the Prehistoric Society of the United Kingdom. The analysis of the Vindija faunal samples was supported the Natural Environment Research Council (U.K.) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Footnotes To whom reprint requests should be addressed. E-mail: trinkaus{at}artsci.wustl.edu . Article published online before print: Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 10.1073 pnas.120178997. Article and publication date are at www.pnas.org cgi doi 10.1073 pnas.120178997 References Top Abstract Introduction Summary and Conclusions References 1. Jaubert, J., Lorblanchet, M., Laville, H., Slott-Moller, R., Turq, A. Brugal, J.-P. (1990) Les Chasseurs d'Aurochs de La Borde: Un Site du Palolithique Moyen (Livernon, Lot) (Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, Paris). 2. Farizy, C., David, F. Jaubert, J. 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Press, Princeton). 55. Berger, T. D. Trinkaus, E. (1995) J. Archaeol. Sci. 22, 841-852 [ISI] . 56. Churchill, S. E. (1993) Archeol. Pap. Am. Anthropol. Assoc. 4, 11-24. 57. Houston, D. C. (1979) in Serengeti: Dynamics of an Ecosystem, eds. Sinclair, A. R.E. Norton-Griffiths, M. (Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago), pp. 263-286. This article has been cited by other articles in HighWire Press -hosted journals: ( Search Google Scholar for Other Citing Articles ) L. Cordain, S B. Eaton, A. Sebastian, N. Mann, S. Lindeberg, B. A Watkins, J. H O'Keefe, and J. Brand-Miller Origins and evolution of the Western diet: health implications for the 21st century Am. J. Clinical Nutrition, February1,2005; 81(2): 341 - 354. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] P. Palmqvist, D. R. Grocke, A. Arribas, and R. A. 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Trinkaus Stable isotope evidence for increasing dietary breadth in the European mid-Upper Paleolithic PNAS, May22,2001; 98(11): 6528 - 6532. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] R. P Heaney Reply to JE Kerstetter et al Am. J. Clinical Nutrition, May1,2001; 73(5): 991 - 992. [Full Text] R. P Heaney Protein intake and bone health: the influence of belief systems on the conduct of nutritional science Am. J. Clinical Nutrition, January1,2001; 73(1): 5 - 6. [Full Text] [PDF] This Article Abstract Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Citation Map Services Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in ISI Web of Science Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to My File Cabinet Download to citation manager Search for citing articles in: ISI Web of Science (49) Request Copyright Permission Google Scholar Articles by Richards, M. P. Articles by Karavani , I. 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Men Show Feelings In Lower Left Quadrant Of FaceWhen it comes to emotions men and women are equally expressive, but men display most of their joy, disgust or other sentiments in the lower left quadrant of their face. Women, on the other hand, show their emotions across their entire countenance.
Men Show Feelings In Lower Left Quadrant Of Face Home Search Men Show Feelings In Lower Left Quadrant Of Face When it comes to men, women and emotion, pet theories abound on whether one sex is more emotional or inhibited than the other. But since such notions are rarely backed by data, University of Florida researchers turned to computer technology to quantify gender differences in one component of emotional expression -- how it is revealed by the face. They discovered that although men and women are equally expressive, men display most of their joy, disgust or other sentiments in the lower left quadrant of their face. Women, on the other hand, show their emotions across their entire countenance. How is this significant? A leading hypothesis is that the findings reflect differences in how brains are wired, said Dawn Bowers,an associate professor in the College of Health Professions' clinical and health psychology department. "There's been an argument that the brains of men are more compartmentalized than the brains of women," said Bowers, who is presenting the research tomorrow (February 17) at the International Neuropsychological Society conference in Chicago. "Previous research has shown, for example, that for men, language functions are very concentrated in the left hemisphere of their brains, whereas in women they are more equally distributed across the brain. "It's possible that is also at work in facial expressions -- that the emotional priming systems for men may be located in the right hemisphere but are more dispersed for women," said Bowers, who is affiliated with UF's Evelyn F. and William L. McKnight Brain Institute. Sparked by thoughts that are fleeting or more lasting, the brain, nerves and muscles work together to produce revealing looks of joy, anger or sadness. Understanding this complex interaction could provide new insight into human relationships, as well as into illnesses in which facial movements can be affected. These include the flat facade of Parkinson's disease or a facial droop sometimes caused by stroke. What's more, the UF-developed computer methodology for "digitizing the moving face" holds potential for assessing pain in patients who cannot speak. It also could be refined to enable computers to recognize and respond to human emotions, said Didem Gkay, a UF doctoral candidate in computer and information sciences who wrote the facial analysis software program CHEES (for Computerized Human Expression Evaluation System). "Outside the health field, automatic facial expression recognition could improve the interaction between human and machine," said Gkay, who also is affiliated with UF's McKnight Brain Institute. "When you work on a computer now, it responds like a robot. We could move toward more friendly interaction. If the machine understands your moods by recognizing your facial expression, that would be a big step." For the pilot study they are reporting this week, the researchers evaluated 25 male and 23 female college students. The participants were videotaped as they demonstrated looks of happiness, sadness, fear, distrust and other sentiments. The images were transferred to a computer, which captured 30 video frames for each one-second expression. Using Gkay's software program, the researchers, who included former UF students Ashish Desai and Charles Richardson, analyzed facial movements by quantifying changes in surface light reflection from one black and white frame to the next. That methodology was first conceived by UF neuroscientist Christiana M. Leonard. "When you look at someone's face, what your brain processes are changes in light reflection across the face as it moves," Bowers said. "So that's what we were looking to do using the computer. We're measuring the face in action." The computer program sums up differences in gray-scale intensity of the pixels that constitute each frame. The resulting scores showed that men and women moved their faces a similar amount to reveal an emotion. But when the scores were broken down by facial regions, it became clear that men's expressions were asymmetrical, with the bulk of the movement confined to the lower left quadrant. Bowers says that without the computer, she cannot consciously see these expression disparities in men and women. It will take more research to determine whether at some level people do perceive these distinctions, affecting how they interpret mood. "There may well be a difference in what men and women pay attention to when they are communicating," Bowers said. She noted that in a previous study, she found that men and women were adept at interpreting tone of voice and content of a spoken message, but that women were slightly better at recognizing the tone and men were a bit stronger at noting the words. Meanwhile, there is much more research to be done on the age-old question of emotional differences in men and women. Bowers said she would like to study whether the sexes differ in how they spontaneously reveal their feelings. "We looked at posed expressions," Bowers said, "so we know that if you tell a guy to be expressive, he can be." - By Victoria White [Contact: Victoria White ] 16-Feb-2001 Add the UniSci Daily Java News Ticker to Your Site or Desktop. Click for a demo and more information. HOME | ARCHIVES | ABOUT | PIOs | BYLINES | WHY SCIENCE | WHY UNISCI | PROSTATE | POLIO Please direct website technical problems or questions to webmaster@unisci.com . Copyright 1995-2001 UniSci. All rights reserved.
DreamsMatthew Wilson contends that animals do have complex dreams.
Animals have complex dreams, MIT researcher proves - MIT News Office Skip to content massachusetts institute of technology news office advanced search news recent research campus by topic events archives services request images subscribe submit news promote news media inquiries about us news office info MIT background contact Animals have complex dreams, MIT researcher proves Study may advance understanding of human learning and memory January 24, 2001 CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Animals have complex dreams and are able to retain and recall long sequences of events while they are asleep, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers report for the first time in the Jan. 25 issue of the journal Neuron. While any pet owner knows that animals seem to dream, and studies show that animals' brains follow the same series of sleeping states as ours do, this is the first time that researchers know what animals are dreaming about. "No one knew for certain that animals dreamed the way we do, which can involve replaying events or at least components of events that occurred while we were awake," said Matthew Wilson of MIT's Center for Learning and Memory. "We looked at the firing patterns of a collection of individual cells to determine the content of rats' dreams. We know that they are in fact dreaming and their dreams are connected to actual experiences." Wilson says that this new ability to eavesdrop on the sleeping brain provides a basis for analyzing the content of dream states. It could be a valuable tool in treating memory disorders such as amnesia or Alzheimer's disease, or it may help devise ways for people to learn and memorize more effectively. "It has been a century since Freud brought forward the study of the subconscious and the examination of the content of dreams as a tool for understanding the nature of cognition and behavior in humans," Wilson said. "We now have the means to bring this world of dreams into the study of animal cognition, and by doing so, gain deeper insight into our own." Running in circles Wilson, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, and biology graduate student Kenway Louie trained rats to run along a circular track for a food reward. They monitored the animals' brain activity during the task and while they were asleep. While the animal ran, its brain created a distinctive pattern of neurons firing in the hippocampus, a brain area known to be involved in memory. Like us, rats go through multiple stages of sleep, from slow-wave sleep to REM sleep. In humans, it is during REM sleep that most dreaming occurs. The researchers then examined more than 40 REM episodes recorded while the rats slept. About half repeated the unique signature of brain activity that was created as the animal ran. The correlation was so close that the researchers found that as the animal dreamed, they could reconstruct where it would be in the maze if it were awake and whether the animal was dreaming of running or standing still. These memories were replayed at about the same speed that the animal had experienced them while awake. Not-so-instant replay Wilson explores how sleep may be involved in the formation of long-term memories. Scientists believe that memories are formed in at least two stages: an initial process that occurs during the experience itself, followed by a consolidation period in which the experience is transformed into long-term memory. The hippocampus is believed to be involved in both stages. The long-term encoding of memories may occur when memories are reactivated during sleep. Wilson's research focuses on how memories are incorporated in the brain during sleep and how reactivating memories during sleep affects long-term memory and performance. "If you learn five things when you are awake, which ones are retained?" Wilson said. He speculates that if certain bits of information are replayed during sleep, this might determine which events we then remember. Studies have shown that humans learning repetitive tasks can use REM sleep to enhance performance. In some cases, this "off-line" practice session seems to be just as good as practicing the experience when awake. Tests have shown that both rats and humans are better at a recently learned task after a period of sleep. Likewise, dreams may represent an opportunity for us to continue to work on a problem while we're asleep. Some people report waking up with a solution to a problem that had been puzzling them for days. "One theory regarding the role of dreams in memory is that dreams may provide the opportunity to bring together experiences that were related, but did not occur at the same time, in order to learn from them," Wilson said. "For example, replaying a series of pleasant or unpleasant experiences may allow us to learn what these experiences had in common and use this to guide future behavior." Animal dreams Why do animals dream about one experience and not another? "This work allows us to evaluate the content of dreams and create tests to see which awake patterns create patterns when the animal is asleep," Wilson said. "If we are able to evaluate the content of the dreaming state, we may be able to find out why certain events get replayed and others don't." This work also raises questions about long-held assumptions about animals' thought processes. Only a handful of species -- among them chimps and dolphins -- were thought to have any ability at all to recall and evaluate detailed sequences of events after they occurred. Wilson points out that "dreams are the ultimate off-line experience. This work demonstrates that animals are capable of re-evaluating their experiences when they are not in the midst of them." The Center for Learning and Memory (CLM) at MIT was established in May 1994 as an independent research center between the departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biology. The mission of this multidisciplinary center is to decipher the brain's molecular and cellular mechanisms and the neural circuitry underlying learning and memory and to piece the puzzle together into an understanding of the intelligent and complex functioning of the brain. Wilson's work is funded by the National Institutes of Health and the RIKEN-MIT Neuroscience Research Center. Image Kenway Louie, MIT TOOLS Print version E-mail article: Use the form below to e-mail a link to this article. To [e-mail addresse(s)]: From (your name): (your e-mail address): Personal message to recipient (optional) The MIT News Office does not store this information. To send, click "E-mail article" below. 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Palaeoanthropology and politicsNorman Levitt reflects on the Kennewick Man affair.
spiked-science | Article | Kennewick Man: burying the truth about America's past All in the hormones? Vivienne Parry talks to Helene Guldberg ASBOs: Politicians behaving badly by Dolan Cummings Search for in All Sections central politics IT science liberties risk culture health life essays SECTIONS central politics IT science liberties risk culture health life essays ISSUES War on Iraq After 11 September spiked-proposals Global warming On animals Genetics Blood clots Mad cow panic Body parts Foot-and-mouth Food scares Go to: spiked-central spiked-science Article Article 9 January 2001 Printer-friendly version Email a friend Kennewick Man: burying the truth about America's past The political drama of the 9000-year-old man has a sorry ending for science and reason. by Norman Levitt When I sat down to write this article, my country was smack in the middle of its greatest political embarrassment since 1876 - maybe even 1860. My feelings were clear and highly partisan. So far as voting goes, I'm a Democrat down to my toenails. My guy got the most votes and was clearly the moral victor; and the fact that George W Bush and his three-watt brain nipped into office over the bleeding carcass of democratic procedure while the band played 'Hail to the Thief' literally sickens me. Yet there is one perverse corner of my soul that looks upon the repudiation of the Democratic administration with a kind of grim approval. This peculiarly monomaniac kink in my intellect looks at everything through the lens of single-issue fanaticism. For some time now, its baleful glare has been directed at one particular palladin of the Clinton administration - secretary of the interior Bruce Babbit - wishing him every possible ill-fortune. Why pick on poor old Babbit? He's been a pretty good steward of his cabinet department for eight years now, staying largely free of serious scandal. He's done a decent job of fending off the rapacious interests that, under more accomodating regimes, have often looted the Interior Department and the American people of their enormous natural resources, creating a terrible mess in the process. He's kept the timber and oil companies from doing too much irreparable damage, and preserved the National Park System, preventing the cynical hand of commerce from defiling it excessively. He's been a generally reliable ally of most serious environmentalists, though nobody can make those guys 100-percent happy. In short, he's performed about as well in his position as is possible for anybody forced to play the game under the Beltway's ground-rules. So why do I wish to see the poor man fed to the dogs? It's not as though my suppurating curmudgeonhood extends to environmental issues. While I'd never make a minimally acceptable Green, I'm pretty sympathetic to mainstream environmentalism so far as genuine issues of public safety and scenic values are concerned. The fact that big oil and big timber don't like Babbitt would, other things being equal, predispose me to like him very much. But there's one big obstacle: the skeleton of a man who died roughly 9000 years ago in what is now the state of Washington near the modern town of Kennewick. 'Kennewick Man', as the descedant is now universally known, was discovered about four years ago along the banks of the Columbia River (1). Suspecting that the remains might be those of a murder victim, the authorities sent them off to Jim Chatters, a local forensic anthropologist. Chatters discovered that Kennewick Man might indeed have met a violent end - but that the suspect weapon was an ancient spear. Carbon-dating of the bones produced an age of 9000 years (since confirmed by further tests). But the obvious conclusion - that the skeleton was that of an ancient Indian - immediately ran into puzzling anatomical inconsistencies. Morphology seemed to rule out an 'Indian' identity. Indeed, the remains seemed more 'Caucasian' than Indian. This obviously implies that much is yet to be understood about the historical movements of people from the Old World to the New. NAGPRA is a well-intentioned piece of legislation that has grown into a monster of anti-scientific bias However, just when Chatters and other scientists were beginning to anticipate an extensive and rewarding study of the skeleton, politcs, chauvinism and convoluted legalisms conspired to frustrate them cruelly. The main culprit was the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) (2), a well-intentioned piece of legislation that has grown into a monster of anti-scientific bias. This measure was initially devised to make amends for generations of arrogance and cultural insensitivity on the part of anthropologists, archaeologists, ethnographers, pot-hunters, and collectors of pre-Columbian art. It mandated the 'repatriation' of human remains, as well as artefacts, to Native American tribes with which they were demonstrably affiliated. Unfortunately, this measure came along just as the tribal groups themselves fell under the sway of an extremely chauvinistic and pugnacious ideology, growing, in part, out of the bitter conditions of Indian life, but also reflecting a larger political mood evident in black and Hispanic separatism, in the militance of feminist and gay activism, and in the widespread enthusiasm for 'multiculturalism' as policy and ideology. Inspired by such sentiments, Indian separatists took to using NAGPRA not merely to reclaim relics and remains clearly tied to existing tribal groups, but, far more boldly, to frustrate all scientific investigation into the deep history of ancient America. In one notorious instance, the activists prevented archaeologists from carbon dating a few isolated human hairs found among the detritus of a 1000-year-old hunting camp. All this stretched the scope and sense of NAGPRA far beyond what its congressional drafters had in mind. But the government officials responsible for enforcing the act apparently found it easier to go along with such extraordinary interpretations rather than risk offending the activists by tempering the process with a little common sense. The Kennewick Man episode that is still being played out in the federal courts represents the phenomenon at its most grotesque. Before Chatters and his colleagues could get fairly started on a systematic study of their material, the feds intervened to seize the skeleton with the avowed intention of 'repatriating' it to the clamouring political activists of a few Northwest tribes. The frantic and indignant scientists rushed into court to prevent this and largely succeeded in halting the return, but not before some of the bones were damaged and a few, apparently, smuggled back to the militants for 'reburial'. A fully fledged trial of the issues ensued; it has been dragging on for several years now. The most fascinating and sobering aspect has been the attitude of the Department of the Interior which, as the custodian of the skeleton, is the defendant in the case. For a long while, the department equivocated, backing the tribal chauvinists on the substantive points without directly endorsing their claim that the skeleton is the Ancient One, the true and venerable ancestor of their peoples. But pressure from the judge forced the department to get off the fence and to declare explicitly whether the Kennewick Man skeleton bears a cultural relation to existing tribes that brings it within the compass of NAGPRA. That decision was made a couple of months ago. It came directly from secretary Babbitt himself. And it affirmed the notion that the tribal coalition has a right to take back and rebury the skeleton, holding that the evidence, as interpreted by Babbitt, sustains the claims of cultural connection. Cultural continuity over nine millenia is an absurd supposition The decision was crazy, flying in the face of scientific evidence already accumulated and simple common sense. The skeleton's age alone refutes the idea of meaningful cultural connection. Cultural continuity over nine millenia is an absurd supposition. The history of humanity, especially of small social groups, is one of continual migration, disintegration, fission and amalgamation. Neither language nor culture, and certainly not geographic location, remains stable for more than a small fraction of that time. On top of this, the physiological evidence obtained so far makes it clear that the people from whom Kennewick Man sprung were a different stock from that which settled the area within the past thousand years or so. (Contrary to the initial media reports, they were probably not 'European' but, more likely, related to certain sparse Asian subpopulations like the Ainu of Japan.) Indeed, this disparity is precisely what makes the remains so fascinating from an archaeological point of view. The demographic picture of the Americas following the last Ice Age is much more complicated and surprising than has traditionally been thought. Babbitt completely disdained these compelling points. Instead, he opted to accept the assertions of the Indian chauvinists that their supposed 'traditions' counted as strong evidence for the state of the world 9000 years ago and that their myths of continuous occupation of tribal lands since the proverbial dawn of time had to be received as evidence that Kennewick Man was their near kin. The horrifying thing about this decision was not merely that it was wrongheaded - that's hardly surprising in any governmental judgement. What truly appalled was the implicit philosophical relativism, the blithe assumption that scientific rationality is merely one path to knowledge, a modality that may work well for Western rationalists but is not binding on cultural Others, who are encouraged to substitute their alternate epistemologies whenever it proves politically convenient. What prompted this bizarre philosophical excursion? Could it be that Babbitt, beyond the bureaucratic facade, is a resolute postmodernist on the model of Foucault or Feyerabend, and, like them, a rumbustious epistemological anarchist? This, I think, is hardly the best explanation. More traditional organisational dynamics were probably at work. Babbitt was, I suppose, very reluctant to overrule the subordinates who had worked long and hard on the case, misconceived as their efforts may have been. Even more important, he most likely wanted to do what he could to mollify Indian activists throughout the country, as well as those few in the Pacific Northwest who were directly concerned with the case. These days, many treaty stipulations and legal concessions once granted to Indian peoples, provisos that have long been treated as virtual dead letters, have come alive with a vengeance. They give tribal groups the power to cause considerable social and economic disruption, should they decide to take that course. Mere prudence would go far towards persuading Babbitt that it's better to butter up the tribal leaders, scientists and scientific truth be damned, than to provoke them and provide further incentive for legal mischief. Scientists don't form a very large voting bloc, after all; nor do they have treaty rights that a sympathetic judge might read as giving them the power to repossess Syracuse, NY or Cleveland, OH. Yet, beyond these practical, if cynical, calculations, I can't help thinking that Babbitt's decision really does manifest just a trace of the postmodernist relativism previously mentioned. How the miasmal stuff might have made its way from a university seminar room to the echoing hallways of Interior is something I can only guess at. But the boundaries of public service are pretty permeable, and it's a sure bet that over the years quite a few intellectuals, semi-intellectuals, quasi-intellectuals, pseudo-intellectuals and outright fakers have diffused through them, trailing a whiff of the academic trendy in their wake. We certainly can't rule out the possibility that in the process, Babbitt, or at least a few of his close advisers, got a bit of the stuff up their nose. What's important and frightening about this story is not merely that scientists, and, in consequence, all of us eventually, were denied a chance to find some new truths about the demographic history of pre-Columbian America. More deeply disturbing is the implicit denigration of science and reason as such, the suggestion that makers of public policy are no longer obliged to defer to traditional canons of scientific judgement in reaching their decisions. This development is very annoying when the questions on the table merely concern archaeology. But when matters involving climate, genetic engineering, 'alternative' medicine, the supposed dangers of power lines, and vaccination come up, as of course they will, the possibility that anti-scientific dogma has systematically clouded official judgement becomes extremely frightening. Bruce Babbitt's unfortunate lapses have given us much to deplore and even more to worry about in the long run. Am I cheered at least a little, then, by the prospect that a new conservative administration will repudiate Babbitt in many matters, including, just possibly, the Kennewick Man case? Frankly, no. Babbitt's good works (and these are many) would probably head the list of things to be nullified. The Kennewick Man business would probably be assigned a pretty low priority. Since Republicans generally take a dimmer view of Indian rights than Democrats, a Republican interior secretary might eventually get around to reversing course in the case. But then, he might equally well decide to embrace the reasoning of Babbitt and Co, not because of outrage at the historic injustices done to native peoples, but because of the logic of the argument - the implicit theory that cultural 'traditions' should have veto power over scientific findings. One can hardly think of a doctrine more suited to the aspirations of the fundamentalists and creationists who want to put scriptural accounts of the origins of the world and its creatures back into America's public schools. Their Republican allies would doubtless relish the opportunity to conscript the ideas of Mr Babbitt and his liberal, multiculturalist friends in order to deliver on their promises to the creationist lobby. It would be an irony to appreciate, perhaps, but not to cherish. Norman Levitt is professor of mathematics at Rutgers University. He is author of Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture and co-author of Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. Read on: Burying the evidence , by Tiffany Jenkins Battle of the bones , by Josie Appleton Who owns human remains? , by Tiffany Jenkins, on openDemocracy spiked-issue: Museums and galleries (1) For official documents on Kennewick Man see here . For general news summary go here . The positions of the eight scientists involved can be found here (2) For a survey of NAGPRA sites and sources see here . The NAGPRA overseer, National Parks, is here To respond to what you've read, send a letter by clicking here What is spiked? spiked is an online publication with the modest ambition of making history as well as reporting it. spiked stands for liberty, enlightenment, experimentation and excellence. Read on... 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An altitude problemPeople in Tibet and the Andes have evolved different strategies of coping with altitude.
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Neurobiology of laughterDid you hear the one about the prefrontal cortex?
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NYTimes.com: Exuberance is RationalRichard Thaler has led a revolution in the study of economics by understanding the strange ways people behave with their money.
Exuberance Is Rational Exuberance Is Rational Or at least human. Richard Thaler has led a revolution in the study of economics by understanding the strange ways people behave with their money. By ROGER LOWENSTEIN Drawings by Gary Baseman t is possible that Richard Thaler changed his mind about economic theory and went on to challenge what had become a hopelessly dry and out-of-touch discipline because, one day, when a few of his supposedly rational colleagues were over at his house, he noticed that they were unable to stop themselves from gorging on some cashew nuts he'd put out. Then again, it could have been because a friend admitted to Thaler that, although he mowed his own lawn to save $10, he would never agree to cut the lawn next door in return for the same $10 or even more. But the moment that sticks in Thaler's mind occurred back in the 1970's, when he and another friend, a computer maven named Jeff Lasky, decided to skip a basketball game in Rochester because of a swirling snowstorm. "But if we had bought the tickets already, we'd go," Lasky noted. Also in This Issue Giuliani's New York The next mayor will inherit a city where the left is dead, capitalism is embraced and residents have made their peace with bourgeois values. But then you never really believed those squeegee guys had rights, now did you? A Mound of Troubles Rick Ankiel was the most promising young left-handed pitcher in a generation. Then his life -- and his pitching -- spun out of control. Why Humanitarian Help Hurts Amid the complexities of post-cold-war trouble spots, aid groups have stumbled badly. In remote Nuba, they have a chance to get it right. "True -- and interesting," Thaler replied. Thaler began to make note of these episodes -- anomalies, he called them -- and to chalk them up on his blackboard at the University of Rochester, where he was a young, unheralded and untenured assistant professor. Each of these stories was at odds with neoclassical economics as it was taught in graduate schools; indeed, each was a tiny subversion of the prevailing orthodoxy. According to accepted economic theory, for instance, a person is always better off with more rather than fewer choices. So why had Thaler's colleagues roundly thanked him for removing the tempting cashews from his living room? The lawn example was even more troubling. Perhaps you dimly remember from Economics 101 that unlovely term, "opportunity cost." The idea, as your pointy-headed prof vainly tried to persuade you, is that forgoing a gain of $10 to mow a neighbor's lawn "costs" just as much as paying somebody else to mow your own. According to theory, you either prefer the extra time or the extra money -- it can't be both. And the basketball tickets refer to "sunk costs." No sense going to the health club just because we have paid our dues, right? After all, the money is already paid -- sunk. And yet, Thaler observed, we do. People, in short, do not behave like the pointy heads say they should. In the ordered world of economics, this rated as a heresy on the scale of Galileo. According to the standard or neoclassical school (essentially a 20th-century updating of Adam Smith), people, in their economic lives, are everywhere and always rational decision makers; those who aren't either learn quickly or are punished by markets and go broke. Among the implications of this view are that market prices are always right and that people choose the right stocks, the right career, the right level of savings -- indeed, that they coolly adjust their rates of spending with each fluctuation in their portfolios, as though every consumer were a mathematician, too. Since the 1970's, this orthodoxy has totally dominated the top universities, not to mention the Nobel Prize committee. Roger Lowenstein is the author of "When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management." He last wrote for the magazine about Sanford I. Weill, the chairman of Citigroup. Thaler spearheaded a simple but devastating dissent. Rejecting the narrow, mechanical homo economicus that serves as a basis for neoclassical theory, Thaler proposed that most people actually behave like . . . people! They are prone to error, irrationality and emotion, and they act in ways not always consistent with maximizing their own financial well being. So serious was Thaler's challenge that Merton Miller, the late Nobelist and neoclassical deity, refused to talk to him; Thaler's own thesis adviser lamented that he had wasted a promising career on trivialities like cashews. Most economists simply ignored him. But the anomalous behaviors documented by Thaler and a band of fellow dissenters, including Yale's Robert Shiller and Harvard's Lawrence Summers, Clinton's last treasury secretary, have grown too numerous to ignore. And the renegades, though still a minority, have embarked on a second stage: an attempt to show that anomalies fall into recognizable and predictable patterns. The hope is that by illuminating these patterns, behavioral economics, as it has come to be called, will yield a new understanding of the economy and markets. Behaviorism, says Daniel McFadden, the recent Nobel laureate, "is a fundamental re-examination of the field. It's where gravity is pulling economic science." haler, after years of being shunned, is now a popular, highly paid professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, the traditional nerve center of neoclassicism. His increasing following is owed in no small part to the fact that behaviorism, unlike so much of economics, is fun. Although prewar economists like John Maynard Keynes were literary artists, most writing in the field since the 70's has been obtuse and highly mathematical, all but inaccessible to the lay person. By contrast, Thaler's papers are rich with intuitive gems drawn from sports, business and everyday life. In one paper, he pointed out that people go across town to save $10 on a clock radio but not to save $10 on a large-screen TV. It's a seemingly obvious point -- and also a direct contradiction of rationalist theory. Thaler loves pointing out that not even economics professors are as rational as the guys in their models. For instance, a bottle of wine that sells for $50 might seem far too expensive to buy for a casual dinner at home. But if you already owned that bottle of wine, having purchased it earlier for far less, you'd be more likely to uncork it for the same meal. To an economist (a sober one, anyway) this makes no sense. But Thaler culled the anecdote from Richard Rosett, a prominent neoclassicist. No sense going to the health club just because we have paid our dues, right? After all, the money is already paid-sunk. And yet we do. People do not behave the way that the pointy heads say they should. A thickset man of 55, Thaler has a sharp wit and a voluble ego. Many assume that his years in the academic wilderness have made him defensive; Thaler denies it. "The last thing I want to do is to sound embittered about having to struggle," he told me, easing his Audi around Lake Michigan toward the Gothic stone campus. But Thaler doesn't so much debate opponents; he skewers them. The British economist Ken Binmore once proclaimed at a seminar that people evolve toward rationality by learning from mistakes. Thaler retorted that people may learn how to shop for groceries sensibly because they do it every week, but the big decisions -- marriage, career, retirement -- don't come up that often. So Binmore's highbrow theories, he concluded, were good for "buying milk." I met Thaler two days after the election, and he was already predicting that the country would be willing to accept Bush as the winner, because "people have a bias toward the status quo." I asked how "status-quo bias" affects economics, and Thaler observed that workers save more when they are automatically enrolled in savings programs than when they have to choose to participate by, say, returning a form. Standard theory holds that workers would make the most rational decision regardless. Savings is an area where Thaler thinks he can have a big impact. Along with Shlomo Benartzi, a collaborator at U.C.L.A., Thaler cooked up a plan called Save More Tomorrow. The idea is to persuade employees to commit a big share of future salary increases to their retirement accounts. People find it less painful to make future concessions because pain deferred is, to an extent, pain denied. Therein lies the logic for New Year's resolutions. Save More Tomorrow was tried with a Chicago company, and workers tripled their savings within a year and a half -- an astounding result. "This is big stuff," Thaler says. He is shopping the plan around to other employers and predicts that eventually it could help raise the country's low savings rate. Though Thaler, who comes across as a middling, Robert Rubin-style Democrat, plays down the connection, such results could provide ammunition to liberals who think government bashing has gone too far. Since the Reagan era, a mantra for office seekers is that people know what is best for themselves. Generally, yes; but what if not always, and what if they err in predictable ways? For instance, Thaler has found that the number of options on a 401(k) menu can affect the employees' selections. Those with a choice of a stock fund and bond fund tend to invest half in each. Those with a choice of three stock funds and one bond fund are likely to sprinkle an equal amount of their savings in each, and thus put 75 percent of the total in stocks. Such behavior illustrates "framing" -- decisions being affected by how choices are positioned. Political pollsters and advertisers have known this for years, though economists are just coming around. Framing has big implications for the debate on privatizing Social Security. Neoclassicists say that people should manage their own retirement accounts, and that the more choices they have the better. Thalerites are not so sure. "If Thaler is right, it makes the current dogmatic antipaternalism really doubtful," says Cass Sunstein, a prominent legal scholar at the University of Chicago. Thaler, who grew up in Chatham, N.J., the son of an actuary, wrote his doctoral thesis at the University of Rochester on the economic "worth" of a human life (public planners tackle this morbid theme frequently, for instance, in determining speed limits). Thaler conceived a clever method of calculation: measuring the difference in pay between life-threatening jobs like logging and safer lines of work. He came up with a figure of $200 a year (in 1967 dollars) for each 1-in-1,000 chance of dying. Sherwin Rosen, his thesis adviser, loved it. Thaler did not. He had been asking friends about it, and most insisted that they would not accept a 1-in-1,000 mortality risk for anything less than a million dollars. Paradoxically, the same friends said they would not be willing to forgo any income to eliminate the risks that their jobs already entailed. Thaler decided that rather than rationally pricing mortality, people had a cognitive disconnect; they put a premium on new risks and casually discounted familiar ones. For a while, Thaler regarded such anomalies as mere cocktail-party fodder. But in 1976 he happened upon the work of two psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and the now-deceased Amos Tversky, who had been studying many of the same behaviors as Thaler. The two had noticed a key pattern: people are more concerned with changes in wealth than with their absolute level -- a violation of standard theory that explained many of Thaler's anomalies. Moreover, most people are "loss averse," meaning they experience more pain from losses than pleasure from gains. This explains why investors hate to sell losers. For Thaler, their work was an epiphany. He wrote to Tversky, who plainly encouraged him. "He took me seriously," Thaler recalled, "and because of that, I started taking it seriously." Drawings by Gary Baseman Thaler began designing experiments to test his ideas. In one, Thaler told lab subjects to imagine they are stranded on a beach on a sweltering day and that someone offers to go for their favorite brand of beer. How much would they be willing to pay? Invariably, Thaler found, subjects agree to pay more if they are told that the beer is being purchased from an exclusive hotel rather than from a rundown grocery. It strikes them as unfair to pay the same. This violates the bedrock principle that one Budweiser is worth the same as another, and it suggests that people care as much about being treated fairly as they do about the actual value of what they're paying for. Although "fairness" is generally ignored by neoclassicists, it's probably a reason why companies do not lower salaries when they encounter tough times -- perversely, laying off workers is considered more fair. Thaler's first paper on anomalies was rejected by the leading economic journals. But in 1980, a new publication, The Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, was desperate for copy, and Thaler's "Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice" saw the light of day. "I didn't have any data," he admits. "It was stuff that was just true." The response from fellow economists was zero. But the article eventually caught the eye of Eric Wanner, a psychologist at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York. Wanner was itching to get economists and psychologists talking to one another, and Thaler took the bait. "He was the first economist who thought hard about the implications for economics," Wanner says. "The reaction of mainstream economists was defensive and hostile. They considered it an attack -- an apostasy." Wanner, who became president of the Russell Sage Foundation, started financing behavioral economics, and Thaler became the informal leader, organizing seminars and summer workshops. In effect, he turned an idea into a movement. "Dick was like a taxonomist who goes out and collects embarrassing specimens," Wanner says. "He learned that to get anyone to pay attention to him he had to develop a portfolio of facts that he could be entertaining about and that economists couldn't sweep under the rug." Thaler's most original contribution was "mental accounting" -- an extension of Kahneman and Tversky's "framing" principle. "Framing" says the positioning of choices prejudices the outcome. "Mental accounting" says people draw their own frames, and that where they place the boundaries subtly affects their decisions. For instance, a poker player who accounts for each day separately may become bolder at the end of a winning night because he feels he is playing with "house money." If he accounted for each hand separately, he would play the first and last hands the same. Most people sort their money into accounts like "current income" and "savings" and justify different expenditures from each. They'll gladly blow their winnings from the office football pool, a "frivolous" account, even while scrupulously salting away every penny of their salaries. haler and a trio of colleagues went on to document that cabdrivers stop working for the day when they reach a target level of income. (Each day's "account" is separate.) This means that -- quite nonsensically -- they work shorter hours on more lucrative days, like when it's raining, and longer hours on days when fares are scarce! In a sense, investors who pay attention to short-term fluctuations are like those cabbies; if they toted up their stocks less frequently, they would be better investors. Thaler went so far as to suggest to an audience at Stanford that investors should be barred from seeing their portfolios more than once every five years. Such irreverence reinforced the view among economists that Thaler could be safely ignored. His anecdotes were fuzzy science, they said, and examples like the cabbies were easy pickings. Since there is no way for a third party to profit from a cabbie's mistake, it's not surprising that he would make one. Thaler knew the criticism had merit, and that to be taken seriously, he had to demonstrate irrationalities in financial markets, which are the purest embodiment of neoclassicism. In the markets, one person's bad decision can be offset by someone else's smart one. Across the markets, rationality should reign. Thaler set out to prove that it did not. His first effort, a 1985 paper with Werner De Bondt, his doctoral student, showed that stocks tend to revert to the mean -- that is, stocks that have outperformed for a sustained period are likely to lag in the future and vice versa. This was a finding that Chicago School types couldn't ignore -- according to their theory, no pattern can be sustained, since if it did, canny traders would try to profit from it, correcting prices until the pattern disappeared. Then, in 1987, Thaler was hired to write a regular Anomalies column for a new economics journal, giving him a widespread audience among his peers. That same year, the stock market crashed 23 percent on a single day. Thaler could hardly have imagined better proof that the market was not, well, perfectly rational. More economists began to mine the data, and by the 90's there was a rich literature of market anomalies, documenting, for example, that people can consistently make money on stocks that trade at low multiples of earnings, or on companies that signal changes by doing things like hiking dividends. Documenting anomalies became a popular pastime from Berkeley to Harvard. haler still has plenty of critics. The harshest one is right upstairs from his office at Chicago, the curmudgeonly Eugene Fama, a longtime advocate of the efficient-market school. "What Thaler does is basically a curiosity item," Fama snipes. "Would you be surprised that every shopper doesn't shop at the lowest prices? Not really. Does that mean that prices aren't competitive?" Thaler periodically invites Fama in to his class to present the other side, but Fama has not returned the gesture and, indeed, sounds bitter that behavioral finance is getting so much attention. "One question that occurs to me," Fama says, "is, 'How did some of this stuff ever get published?"' The objection raised most often, from Fama and others, is that if Thaler is right and the market is so screwy, why wouldn't more fund managers be able to beat it? A variation of this theme is that if behavioral economics, for all its intuitive appeal, can't help people make money, what good is it? Thaler, actually, is a director in a California money management firm, Fuller Thaler Asset Management, which, according to figures it provided, has been beating the market handily since 1992. The firm tries to exploit various behavioral patterns, like "categorization": when Lucent Technologies was riding high, people categorized it as a "good stock" and mentally coded news about it in a favorable way. Lately, Lucent has become a "bad stock." But Thaler, who does not get involved in picking stocks, stops short of suggesting that investors versed in his research can beat the market. Mispricings that spring from anomalies are hard to spot, he says, particularly when the people looking for them are prone to their own behavioral quirks. If this sounds muted, it may be because Thaler is ready to declare victory and join the establishment. The neoclassical model, he admits, is a fine starting point; it's misleading only when regarded as a perfect or all-encompassing description. People aren't crazy, he adds, but their rationality is "bounded" by the tendencies that Kahneman, Tversky, himself and others have studied. What he hopes is that a future generation will resolve the schism by building behavioral tendencies into a new, more flexible model. For now, Thaler is still looking for new miniature applications wherever he can find them, like on the basketball court recently. Thaler studied games in which a team trails by 2 points, with time left for just one shot. What to go for, 2 points or 3? A 2-point shot succeeds about half the time, a 3-pointer about 33 percent of the time. But since a 2-point basket would only tie the game (and force an overtime, in which the team has a 50-50 chance of winning), going for a 3-pointer is a superior strategy. Still, most coaches go for 2. Why? Because it lowers the risk of sudden loss. Coaches, like the rest of us, do more to avoid losing than they do to win. You won't find an explanation for that in the mechanical homo economicus of theory. But it has everything to do with folks Thaler thinks are much more relevant to the economy -- Homo sapiens. 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The sweet smell of the immune systemManfred Milinski and Claus Wedekind find evidence for the hypothesis that "perfumes are selected "for self" to amplify in some way body odors that reveal a person's immunogenetics".
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UnconsciousPhilip Wong and Howard Shevrin have uncovered neurobiological evidence for the human unconscious state.
Clinical Research News March 02, 2001 Clinical Research News Brain Science Gets in Touch with the Unconscious Although scientists still aren't sure what human consciousness is, they are coming up with something just as intriguingneurobiological evidence for the human unconscious state. Scientists have not yet determined the neurobiological basis of human consciousnessthat nebulous place where the hard wiring of the human brain interfaces with thoughts, emotions, and behavior. Yet at the same time, they are coming up with something equally pioneering and titillating: neurobiological evidence for the human unconscious state. Two scientists doing this research are Philip Wong, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist at the New School University in New York City, and his mentor, Howard Shevrin, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Wong described some of their work at the December meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in New York City at the session "Research on the Relation of Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience: Are There Neural Correlatives of Signal Anxiety?" Shevrin was also present. Morton Reiser, M.D., who headed up the psychiatry department at Yale University for 17 years and is now a Yale professor emeritus, chaired the session. In an interview with Psychiatric News, he pointed out that whereas "brain science deals with concrete things, matter and energy, you can measure them, weigh them, and so on," and whereas "mental science deals with things that are immaterial, such as meaning and motive, things that are communicated in words, that come out of subjective experience," the work of Wong and Shevrin deals with the interface of these two domains. Their research, he declared, "essentially is showing the brain mechanism for phenomena that you study psychologically. [It] is fine work." Charles Fisher, M.D., a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco and coordinator of the session, agreed. As he indicated to Psychiatric News, he does not believe it is an overstatement to describe Wong and Shevrins experiments as "extremely important" and "frontier neurobiological evidence." In one of the experiments that Wong and Shevrin conducted, for instance, subjects hooked up to an electroencephalograph were consciously aware of being exposed to a face accompanied by a mild finger shock. In other words, they were being conditioned to associate the face with something unpleasant. Before, during, and after this conditioning, their brain-wave patterns were recorded. Some time later, the subjects were once again hooked up to an electroencephalograph, but this time they were quickly exposed to the face without a shockso quickly that they were not consciously aware of seeing the face. Before, during, and after this exposure their brain-wave patterns were recorded. The researchers then compared the subjects brain-wave patterns from the postconditioning phase with the conditioning-phase patterns. They noted something very interesting: During the postconditioning phase, distinct slow wave brain activity occurred precisely before the point where a shock had been delivered in the conditioning phase. This distinct slow wave brain activity, Wong and Shevrin believe, constituted neurobiological evidence for unconscious anticipation of an unpleasant event, that is, that a shock would probably be delivered along with the face. Or as Wong put it in an interview, "It does seem like, if there is an event that happened in the past, and a similar circumstance occurs in the present, then the brain is anticipating that the same kind of thing will happen that happened in the past." Wong and Shevrin believe that they documented neurobiological activity underlying what Freud called "signal anxiety"anticipation of danger. And it was precisely because Wong and Shevrins research has implications for psychoanalysis and psychodynamic therapy that they were invited to speak at the psychoanalysts meeting and that some of their research results have been published in the June 1999 Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
Swanson et al. 98 (5): 2509A new study by Willie J. Swanson and colleagues provides evidence of sperm competition and sexual conflict.
Positive Darwinian selection drives the evolution of several female reproductive proteins in mammals -- Swanson et al. 98 (5): 2509 -- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Published online before print February 20, 2001, 10.1073 pnas.051605998 PNAS | February 27, 2001 | vol. 98 | no. 5 | 2509-2514 This Article Full Text Full Text (PDF) Supplemental Figure Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Citation Map Services Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in ISI Web of Science Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to My File Cabinet Download to citation manager Cited by other online articles Search for citing articles in: ISI Web of Science (114) Request Copyright Permission Google Scholar Articles by Swanson, W. J. Articles by Aquadro, C. F. Articles citing this Article PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Swanson, W. J. Articles by Aquadro, C. F. Evolution Positive Darwinian selection drives the evolution of several female reproductive proteins in mammals (zona pellucida ZP3 fertilization sperm competition sexual conflict) Willie J. Swanson*, , Ziheng Yang , Mariana F. Wolfner*, and Charles F. Aquadro* *Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Biotechnology Building, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-2703; and Department of Biology, University College London, 4Stephenson Way, London NW1 2HE, United Kingdom Communicated by M.T.Clegg, University of California, Riverside, CA, December 20,2000 (received for review May 15,2000) Rapid evolution driven by positive Darwinian selection is a recurrent theme in male reproductive protein evolution. In contrast, positive selection has never been demonstrated for female reproductive proteins. Here, we perform phylogeny-based tests on three female mammalian fertilization proteins and demonstrate positive selection promoting their divergence. Two of these female fertilization proteins, the zona pellucida glycoproteins ZP2 and ZP3, are part of the mammalian egg coat. Several sites identified in ZP3 as likely to be under positive selection are located in a region previously demonstrated to be involved in species-specific sperm-egg interaction, suggesting the selective pressure is related to male-female interaction. The results provide long-sought evidence for two evolutionary hypotheses: sperm competition and sexual conflict. To whom reprint requests should be addressed. Email: wjs18{at}cornell.edu . www.pnas.org cgi doi 10.1073 pnas.051605998 This article has been cited by other articles in HighWire Press -hosted journals: ( Search Google Scholar for Other Citing Articles ) V. B. DuMont and C. F. Aquadro Multiple Signatures of Positive Selection Downstream of Notch on the X Chromosome in Drosophila melanogaster Genetics, October1,2005; 171(2): 639 - 653. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] J. L. Mueller, K. R. Ram, L. A. 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Dellos Molecular Correlates of Genes Exhibiting RNAi Phenotypes in Caenorhabditis elegans Genome Res., December1,2003; 13(12): 2651 - 2657. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] L. P. Martinez-Castilla and E. R. Alvarez-Buylla Adaptive evolution in the Arabidopsis MADS-box gene family inferred from its complete resolved phylogeny PNAS, November11,2003; 100(23): 13407 - 13412. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] Y. Lu and M. D. Rausher Evolutionary Rate Variation in Anthocyanin Pathway Genes Mol. Biol. Evol., November1,2003; 20(11): 1844 - 1853. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] O. Podlaha and J. Zhang Positive selection on protein-length in the evolution of a primate sperm ion channel PNAS, October14,2003; 100(21): 12241 - 12246. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] C. D. Meiklejohn, J. Parsch, J. M. Ranz, and D. L. Hartl Rapid evolution of male-biased gene expression in Drosophila PNAS, August19,2003; 100(17): 9894 - 9899. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] U. Sorhannus The Effect of Positive Selection on a Sexual Reproduction Gene in Thalassiosira weissflogii (Bacillariophyta): Results Obtained from Maximum-Likelihood and Parsimony-Based Methods Mol. Biol. Evol., August1,2003; 20(8): 1326 - 1328. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] M. Anisimova, R. Nielsen, and Z. Yang Effect of Recombination on the Accuracy of the Likelihood Method for Detecting Positive Selection at Amino Acid Sites Genetics, July1,2003; 164(3): 1229 - 1236. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] B. E. Galindo, V. D. Vacquier, and W. J. Swanson Positive selection in the egg receptor for abalone sperm lysin PNAS, April15,2003; 100(8): 4639 - 4643. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] T. J. Barkman Evidence for Positive Selection on the Floral Scent Gene Isoeugenol-O-methyltransferase Mol. Biol. Evol., February1,2003; 20(2): 168 - 172. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] K. S. Zigler and H. A. Lessios Evolution of Bindin in the Pantropical Sea Urchin Tripneustes: Comparisons to Bindin of Other Genera Mol. Biol. Evol., February1,2003; 20(2): 220 - 231. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] A. Civetta Positive Selection Within Sperm-Egg Adhesion Domains of Fertilin: An ADAM Gene with a Potential Role in Fertilization Mol. Biol. Evol., January1,2003; 20(1): 21 - 29. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] W. J. Swanson, R. Nielsen, and Q. Yang Pervasive Adaptive Evolution in Mammalian Fertilization Proteins Mol. Biol. Evol., January1,2003; 20(1): 18 - 20. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] G. T. Miller and S. Pitnick Sperm-Female Coevolution in Drosophila Science, November8,2002; 298(5596): 1230 - 1233. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] D. G. Torgerson, R. J. Kulathinal, and R. S. Singh Mammalian Sperm Proteins Are Rapidly Evolving: Evidence of Positive Selection in Functionally Diverse Genes Mol. Biol. Evol., November1,2002; 19(11): 1973 - 1980. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] M. Mondragon-Palomino, B. C. Meyers, R. W. Michelmore, and B. S. Gaut Patterns of Positive Selection in the Complete NBS-LRR Gene Family of Arabidopsis thaliana Genome Res., September1,2002; 12(9): 1305 - 1315. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] F. M. Jiggins, G. D. D. Hurst, and Z. Yang Host-Symbiont Conflicts: Positive Selection on an Outer Membrane Protein of Parasitic but not Mutualistic Rickettsiaceae Mol. Biol. Evol., August1,2002; 19(8): 1341 - 1349. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] M. Anisimova, J. P. Bielawski, and Z. Yang Accuracy and Power of Bayes Prediction of Amino Acid Sites Under Positive Selection Mol. Biol. Evol., June1,2002; 19(6): 950 - 958. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] Z. Yang and R. Nielsen Codon-Substitution Models for Detecting Molecular Adaptation at Individual Sites Along Specific Lineages Mol. Biol. Evol., June1,2002; 19(6): 908 - 917. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] J. A. Riffell, P. J. Krug, and R. K. Zimmer Fertilization in the sea: the chemical identity of an abalone sperm attractant J. Exp. Biol., May15,2002; 205(10): 1439 - 1450. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] D. J. Miller, X. Shi, and H. Burkin Molecular Basis of Mammalian Gamete Binding Recent Prog. Horm. Res., January1,2002; 57(1): 37 - 73. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] A. Eriksson, V. Tohonen, A. Wedell, and K. Nordqvist Isolation of the human testatin gene and analysis in patients with abnormal gonadal development Mol. Hum. Reprod., January1,2002; 8(1): 8 - 15. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] Z. Yang and W. J. Swanson Codon-Substitution Models to Detect Adaptive Evolution that Account for Heterogeneous Selective Pressures Among Site Classes Mol. Biol. Evol., January1,2002; 19(1): 49 - 57. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] J. P. Huelsenbeck, F. Ronquist, R. Nielsen, and J. P. Bollback Bayesian Inference of Phylogeny and Its Impact on Evolutionary Biology Science, December14,2001; 294(5550): 2310 - 2314. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] Y. Suzuki and M. Nei Reliabilities of Parsimony-based and Likelihood-based Methods for Detecting Positive Selection at Single Amino Acid Sites Mol. Biol. Evol., December1,2001; 18(12): 2179 - 2185. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] L. L. Knowles and T. A. Markow Sexually antagonistic coevolution of a postmating-prezygotic reproductive character in desert Drosophila PNAS, July17,2001; 98(15): 8692 - 8696. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] W. J. Swanson, A. G. Clark, H. M. Waldrip-Dail, M. F. Wolfner, and C. F. Aquadro Evolutionary EST analysis identifies rapidly evolving male reproductive proteins in Drosophila PNAS, June19,2001; 98(13): 7375 - 7379. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] Current Issue | Archives | Online Submission | Info for Authors | Editorial Board | About Subscribe | Advertise | Contact | Site Map Copyright 2001 by the National Academy of Sciences
Psychological brain damageMartin Teicher and colleagues report four types of brain damage caused by psychological abuse.
Clinical Research News March 02, 2001 Clinical Research News Psychological Abuse May Cause Changes in Brain Although it may sound rather far-fetched that the psychological impact of childhood physical abuse can physically alter the brain, evidence is increasing that this is the case. By Joan Arehart-Treichel If a child is hit on the head, one would not be surprised if brain injury results. But suppose a child experienced psychological trauma because of physical abuse. Could such psychological trauma harm the brain as well? This possibility may seem rather far-fetched to some people, but not to Martin Teicher, M.D., Ph.D. Teicher is a developmental neuropsychiatrist and director of the Developmental Biopsychiatry Research Program at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. Teicher and his colleagues have held the hypothesis for some time that the psychological trauma resulting from childhood physical abuse induces a cascade of physiological effects, including changes in hormones and neurotransmitters that mediate development in vulnerable brain regions. Whats more, they have conducted a number of studies that support the hypothesis. In fact, results from their studies suggest that the psychological impact of childhood physical abuse can damage the brain in four major ways, and some of these results are also buttressed by other scientists findings. First, it appears as if this psychological impact can hurt the temporal lobes, important for sound and spoken language, and the limbic systemthe brains emotional processing center. In one of their studies making this point, Teicher and his colleagues devised the Limbic System Checklist, which measures whether, and how often, a person experiences symptoms indicating seizures in either the temporal lobes or limbic area of the brain, such as a ringing or buzzing sound, flashing lights, feelings of dj vu or mind-body dissociation, and so forth. They then gave the checklist to 253 adults who came to an outpatient mental health clinic for psychiatric assessment. Slightly more than half of these adults reported that they had been abused physically as children and that this physical abuse had sometimes included sexual abuse. Teicher and his coworkers then compared the checklist scores of those adults who reported no abuse with those of adults who had. The scores of those reporting abuse, they found, were considerably higher49 percent higher in those reporting sexual abuse, and 38 percent in those reporting physical abuse other than that of a sexual nature. Subjects who reported both kinds of abuse had scores 113 percent higher than subjects reporting no abuse. Males and females appeared to be similarly affected. Second, it appears as if the psychological impact of childhood physical abuse can damage the corpus callosumthe major information pathway between the two brain hemispheres. In one of their studies, Teicher and his coworkers found that sexual abuse in girls was associated with a major reduction in the size of the corpus callosum. (This result was independently replicated by Michael DeBellis, M.D., a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh.) Third, it appears as if the psychological impact of childhood physical abuse can especially harm the left hemisphere of the brain. In one of their studies that made this point, Teicher and his colleagues reviewed the records of 115 youngsters who were consecutively admitted to a child and adolescent psychiatric hospital to see whether they could link a history of physical abuse, sexual abuse, or both to brain-wave abnormalities. They could, they found. Specifically, of those youngsters reporting a history of physical abuse, sexual abuse, or both, 60 percent showed brain-wave abnormalities. J. Douglas Bremner, M.D., and colleagues at Yale University Medical School have also linked left-brain damage to childhood physical or sexual abuse. When they compared MRI scans of 17 adult survivors of childhood physical or sexual abuse with those of 17 control subjects, they found the left hippocampus of the abused subjects was 12 percent smaller than that of the controls. Whats more, the abnormalities were mostly or even exclusively in the left hemisphere of the brain. Finally, the psychological impact ensuing from childhood physical abuse appears capable of damaging the cerebellar vermis, an area of the brain involved in emotion, attention, and the regulation of the limbic system. In one study, Teicher and his colleagues used a new functional magnetic resonance imaging technique, T2 relaxometry, to measure cerebellar vermis activity in 32 adults. Fifteen of the adults reported having been sexually or verbally abused as children; 17 did not. Those reporting abuse showed greater activity in the cerebellar vermis than had the control subjects. An overview of the findings by Teicher and his colleagues, as well as of the implications of these findings for psychiatry, was published in the fall 2000 issue of Cerebrum. In this overview, Teicher wrote: "I hope that new understanding of childhood abuses impact on the brain will lead to new ideas for treatment. The most immediate conclusion from our work, however, is the crucial need for prevention. If childhood maltreatment exerts enduring negative effects on the developing brain, fundamentally altering ones mental capacity and personality, it may be possible to compensate for these abnormalitiesto succeed in spite of thembut it is doubtful that they can actually be reversed in adulthood."
Why do we adapt? The answer's in your genesRichard Dawkins discusses 'selfish genes'.
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IQ and longevityResults of an intelligence test, given to all 11-year olds attending Aberdeen schools in 1932, were used to determine survival up to 76 years. Of 2,230 subjects traced, those who died before 1 January 1997 had a significantly lower IQ at age 11 years than those who were alive or untraced. This suggests that high mental ability in late childhood reduces the chances of death up to age 76.
Website of the week: Intelligence, schizophrenia, and the corporate industry -- Mllner 322 (7290): 871 -- BMJ Home Help Search Archive Feedback Table of Contents Author Keyword(s) Vol Page [Advanced] This article Respond to this article Alert me when this article is cited Alert me when responses are posted Alert me when a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Find similar articles in BMJ Find similar articles in PubMed Add article to my folders Download to citation manager Google Scholar Articles by Mllner, M. Articles citing this Article PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Mllner, M. Related content Related Article BMJ 2001;322:871 (7April) Reviews Website of the week Intelligence, schizophrenia, and the corporate industry According to a paper in this week's BMJ (p 819 ), better childhood mental ability predicts a longer life. Hundreds of promising sites on the web will allow you to measure your intelligence, creativity, sexuality, or emotional intelligence www.selfgrowth.com test.html is just one of the many collections of links. I tried several of these tests: some are fun, some are annoying (I wasted at least 15minutes of my time on one, and the test finally didn't analyse my intelligent answers), and some are predictable (usually the creativity tests click everything that would put off an average person, then you will always get a high score). If you like such tests try the Mensa workout ( www.mensa.org ). It's on the home page of Mensa, a society for bright people that welcomes "people from every walk of life whose IQ is in the top 2% of the population." I also encountered a mental health IQ test ( www.mhasp.org coping mh_iq.html ), which is, as you may imagine, a tool to create awareness of the issue of mental health. Furthermore, a higher IQ seems to protect you from schizophrenia. The source of this statement is a free encyclopaedia of mental health information ( www.mentalhealth.com book p42-sc5.htmlHead_5 ), but don't expect a thrilling site. It is hard to say how much of the information is grounded in the available evidence, but it is obvious that the authors took great pains to compile this website and make it accessible free of charge while refusing corporate sponsorship. Then look at one of the sites sponsored by "an unrestricted educational grant" (such as www.mhsource.com schizophrenia ). This provides almost everything you could expect from a website: a neat layout, interactivity, streaming audio and conference series slide shows. However, I would ask all doctors who enjoy this audiovisual pleasure to visit www.nofreelunch.org . MarcusMllner . BMJ marcus.muellner{at}univie.ac.at BMJ 2001 Related Article Longitudinal cohort study of childhood IQ and survival up to age 76 Lawrence J Whalley and Ian J Deary BMJ 2001 322: 819. [Abstract] [Full Text] This article Respond to this article Alert me when this article is cited Alert me when responses are posted Alert me when a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Find similar articles in BMJ Find similar articles in PubMed Add article to my folders Download to citation manager Google Scholar Articles by Mllner, M. Articles citing this Article PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Mllner, M. Related content Related Article Home Help Search Archive Feedback Table of Contents 2001 BMJ Publishing Group Ltd
Sport and geneticsStephen Jay Gould and Kipchoge Keino on why athletic achievement isn't in the genes.
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Reproductive greontologyThe relationship between aging and the risk of producing offspring with gene-influenced illnesses.
Guardian Unlimited | Archive Search Go to: Guardian Unlimited home UK news World news Newsblog ---------------------- Archive search Arts Books EducationGuardian.co.uk Film Football Jobs MediaGuardian.co.uk Money The Observer Politics Science Shopping SocietyGuardian.co.uk Sport Talk Technology Travel Been there ---------------------- Audio Email services Special reports The Guardian The northerner The wrap ---------------------- Advertising guide Crossword Soulmates dating Headline service Syndication services Events offers Help contacts Feedback Information GNL press office Living our values Newsroom Notes Queries Reader Offers Style guide Travel offers TV listings Weather Web guides Working at GNL ---------------------- Guardian Weekly Money Observer Public Networkhome UKnews Worldlatest Books Money Film Society TheObserver Politics Education Shopping Work Football Jobs Media Search Schizophrenia linked to father's age Tim Radford, science editor Guardian Friday April 13, 2001 Men over 50 are three times more likely to father children with schizophrenia, according to New York scientists. And men between 45 and 50 are twice as likely as males under 25 to have children with the mental illness. "A man has a biological clock, too," said Dolores Malaspina, of Columbia University college of physicians and surgeons. "Men should be aware of the risks when they do their family planning." She and colleagues worked with the New York University school of medicine and the Israeli ministry of health to review the records of almost 88,000 people born in Jerusalem between 1964 and 1976. This is the first link between paternal age and mental illness. There is growing evidence that older men are more likely to have children with gene-influenced illnesses. Paternal age has been tied to an increasing likelihood of prostate cancer, cancer of the nervous system, neurofibromatosis, the most common type of dwarfism, malformation of the skull, hands and feet, and Marfan syndrome, which involves defects of the eyes, bones, heart and blood vessels. Most of these are rare conditions. Schizophrenia affects one in 100 and the paternal age connection would only become visible in a very large survey. The hypothesis is that with the years sperm cells are more likely to accumulate mutations which could be passed on to offspring. But schizophrenia remains a puzzle. It seems to be more prevalent in some groups, and researchers have claimed several times to have identified schizophrenia genes. However, there could also be environmental factors. The New York study cannot identify which genes or what environmental factors might be at work. But the illness is remarkably persistent in human populations, even though schizophrenics are less likely to marry and have children. The New York scientists believe the paternal age factor might explain why the proportion of schizophrenics remains roughly the same in each generation. The researchers reported in the latest Archives of General Psychiatry that more than 26% of cases could be attributed to the father's age. Susan Harlap, of New York University, a co-author of the report, said: "Our study suggests that a man's progeny are going to be healthiest if he has his children during his early 20s. But we know that many men aren't ready for marriage and parenthood at that age." She added: "I would guess that our study is just the tip of the iceberg. It would seem that the father's sperm is going to turn out to be just as important as the mother's egg." Older women are much more likely to have a caesarean birth, even when problems during labour are taken into account, according to research published today. Women over 40 who are having their first child are up to 14 times more likely to have the operation as those under 30, a study has found. The findings, published in the British Medical Journal, have again raised concern that many women are having unnecessary caesareans. Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
Men fish for complimentsThe menfolk of the Meriam, a people who live on islands off the northeast tip of Australia, spend their time spear-fishing and turtle-hunting, but are they really fishing for compliments?
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Chimps touched by televisionChimpanzees are moved by fearful or appealing television scenes.
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Domestication's Family TreeDNA is revealing that taming animals was not a simple process.
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That is especially true of archaeology. The study of genes has already illuminated humanitys history, showing how and when the species spread from its African roots to the farthest corners of the world. Now it is uncovering details of the most significant period of that history, the beginning of agriculture. The latest piece of the jigsaw was published in this weeks Nature by Christopher Troy of Trinity College, Dublin, and David MacHugh of University College, Dublin. They and their colleagues have been trying to work out whether modern European cattle were domesticated from the now extinct auroch (Bos primigenius) that once roamed the continent, or are the descendants of cattle that were brought from the Middle East by the settlers who are believed to have introduced agriculture to Europe around 7,000 years ago. To answer this question, Dr Troy and Dr MacHugh turned to mitochondrial DNA . This particular form of the genetic material is more abundant in a cell than is the familiar DNA of the cells nucleus. That is because each cell has many mitochondria. They are the cellular components that release energy from glucose, and they have their own DNA because they were, in the distant evolutionary past, free-living bacteria. By contrast, a cell has but a single nucleus. Extracting mitochondrial DNA from old bones is therefore easier than extracting nuclear DNA . That is what Dr Troy and Dr MacHugh did. They took mitochondrial DNA samples from four fossil aurochs found in Britain and compared them with the mitochondrial DNA of modern cattle from Europe, Africa and the Middle East. As time passes, mutations accumulate in the DNA , as one letter of the genetic code is replaced by another. By looking at the number of differences between the DNA -sequences of two creatures it is possible to see how closely related they are. It is also possible to estimate how much time has passed since they shared a common ancestor, since the rate at which letters are substituted usually remains constant for particular types of creature. As the diagram shows, the aurochs, though related to Middle Eastern and European cattle, are on a branch by themselves. The aboriginal Europeans did not, it seems, have the wit to domesticate cattle. It took a bunch of immigrants to show them how. That, until recently, would have been regarded as a textbook example of the way that agriculture developed. Species, it was theorised, were domesticated only once and the result diffused to the rest of the world. Over the past few years, though, other genetic studies have revealed a more interesting pattern. The diagram of the cattle family tree published by Dr Troy and Dr MacHugh incorporates another branch, discovered a little while ago by Daniel Bradley, one of their collaborators who also works at Trinity College. Dr Bradley was responsible for testing the theory that modern cattle are the result of not one but two separate domestications. This theory, which predates even Charles Darwin, is based on the very different anatomies of cattle found in Europe and the Middle East, compared with those from India. In particular, the westerly cattle lack the shoulder humps of zebu, the Indian breed. Those who support the idea of a single domestication suggest that the distinctions could be the result of subsequent selective breeding. Dr Bradley, though, used mitochondrial DNA to show that the most recent common ancestor of Bos taurus (the western cow) and Bos indicus (the zebu) may have lived as much as 1m years agowell before Homo sapiens existed. Til the cows come home In Africa, the story is more confusing. African cattle have features of both Bos taurus and Bos indicus, but their mitochondrial DNA suggests that, despite this apparently intermediate nature, they all belong to Bos taurus. Mitochondrial DNA , however, is unusual in being passed down only from mothers to offspring (sperm leave their mitochondria behind when they fertilise an egg). When Dr Bradley examined the nuclear DNA of cattle, and in particular that of their Y chromosomes, which confer maleness, he found a different picture. Zebu-like cattle in Africa did, indeed, turn out to have Indian genes in them. But those genes have come, overwhelmingly, from male Indian cattle. That suggests cattle originally came to Africa from the Middle East, as geography might predict. But it also suggests that, when trade eventually brought Indian cattle to Africa, the zebu took the fancy of African stock-breeders, who deliberately studded their females with Indian males. That explains the mixture of characteristics, and also why the female-linked DNA looks Middle Eastern and the male-linked DNA looks Indian. Cattle are not the only animals to have been domesticated on more than one occasion. Mitochondrial DNA suggests that goats, sheep, pigs, yaks and buffalo were each domesticated at least twice. Dogs were domesticated at least four times. And the mitochondrial tree for horses is so tangled that it is impossible to say exactly how many times people first slung themselves into the saddle. That is intriguing for two reasons. First, it suggests that lots of people had the idea of domesticating animals independently, rather than the process being tried out only once for each species. Second, it adds weight to the idea that the reason such a limited number of animals has been domesticated is not because people stopped when they felt they had enough species for their needs, but rather because they tried many times and frequently failed. It was only with the ancestors of the species that now grace farmyards that they got results. Advertisement Melinda Zeder of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC , who studies the process by which goats were domesticated, observes that the wild forms of those species that have been domesticated tend to live in groups and have fairly clear dominance hierarchies. This makes it easy for them to fit in with humanity. Animals such as gazelles, which would, on the face of things, be good candidates for domestication, do not have such hierarchies, so they would not easily submit to the discipline that the farmyard requires. Whether the free-spirited gazelle is better off than the cosseted goat, cow or sheep is an open question. Back to top Printable page E-mail this Related Items More articles about... Agriculture Websites Molecular Biogeography and Genetic Structure of Domestic Cattle , David MacHugh's PhD thesis, is available online. Genetic evidence for Near-Eastern origins of European cattle , an article by Christopher Troy, Mr MacHugh and their colleagues, is available for purchase from Nature. Advertisement Advertisement Classifieds Jobs Junior Programme Specialist Call for Candidatures The Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dial.... Business Consumer WSI Internet - Start Your Own Business Business Opportunity - WSI Internet Start Your Own Busines.... Tenders United Nations Office for Project Services CALL FOR EXPRESSION OF INTEREST (EOI) BENEFICIARY COUNTRY.... Jobs Senior Country Directors CARE Canada seeking senior development relief professionals for Country Director positions..... Tenders Request for Proposals: Learning Programme on Public Policy, Advocacy and Partnerships for Children and Womens Rights Jobs Regulatory Economist Shaping policy in the worlds largest mobile telecommunication company Attractive s.... 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Ring-breaker drives dove loveLeonida Fusani and colleagues discover the role of aromatase in courtship behaviour.
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Gene-Trapping Method Powers Discovery of New Brain-Wiring SignalsMarc Tessier-Lavigne and William C. Skarnes unveil a technique that "enables scientists to identify new genes and to determine which genes are responsible for defects in brain wiring that are observed during development".
HHMI News: Gene-Trapping Method Powers Discovery of New Brain-Wiring Signals Zooming in on the Protein-Conducting Channel Development Genes Evolve New Functions PET Imaging Reveals the Immune System at Work More March 08, 2001 Gene-Trapping Method Powers Discovery of New Brain-Wiring Signals Researchers have developed a powerful screening method to identify genes that produce proteins that guide the wiring of the trillions of connections in the mammalian brain. The technique enables scientists to identify new genes and to determine which genes are responsible for defects in brain wiring that are observed during development. The scientists believe that this technique is likely to accelerate the discovery of new molecules involved in axon guidance. Neurons wire themselves into networks by extending cable-like axons that grow toward specific targets in the nervous system. An axons path toward a target neuron is steered by growth cones in the tip of the axon that receive cues about the best path to follow from chemical attractants and repellents secreted by cells in the nervous system. These attractants and repellents are collectively called axon guidance molecules. Up until now, weve gone about trying to identify brain wiring mechanisms one guidance event at a time, one molecule at a time. With the gene-trapping approach, we can cast a much wider net, studying a great many genes simultaneously, and then determining the effects of mutating them. Marc Tessier-Lavigne In an article published in the March 8, 2001, issue of Nature, researchers led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Marc Tessier-Lavigne at the University of California, San Francisco and William C. Skarnes at the University of California, Berkeley, unveil their new technique and discuss some early applications of the method. The new gene-trapping technique could liberate scientists from laborious genetic screens and biochemical approaches that are currently used to identify new molecules involved in axon guidance, the researchers say. Up until now, weve gone about trying to identify brain wiring mechanisms one guidance event at a time, one molecule at a time, said Tessier-Lavigne. For example, in past work studying axon guidance in the spinal cord, we developed an assay to study the growth of one particular class of axon. And that study then led us, through extensive biochemical work, to identify a small family of guidance molecules called the netrins. Guidance molecules either attract or repel the growing axons of neurons by plugging into receptors on the surface of the axon tip. Typically, each guidance molecule or receptor is identified individually through time-consuming screening of random chemically induced mutations, Tessier-Lavigne said. However, with the gene-trapping approach, we can cast a much wider net, studying a great many genes simultaneously, and then determining the effects of mutating them. The gene trapping technique was built on a method developed earlier by Skarnes at the University of California, Berkeley. Skarnes technique involved mutating genes in mouse embryonic stem cells by randomly inserting a complex genetic marker with two componentsthe first is a marker gene that produces a blue color in cells carrying the inserted gene and the second is a drug-resistance gene. Thus, the scientists can easily identify cells of interest by applying a drug to weed out those that did not take up the drug-resistance gene and then use the blue color to distinguish them further. Skarness method refined this standard gene-trap vector to include a gene segment that would only activate the blue marker if the DNA had fused itself into a gene for a membrane protein, such as a receptor. With this refinement, called a secretory trap, the researchers were able to narrow down the trapped genes to those coding for receptors of the kind involved in axon guidance. The secretory trap vector is a nice bonus because we can focus on exactly the kinds of molecules were interested inmainly receptors and ligands, said Tessier-Lavigne. These genes represent only a small fraction of the genome, and this trap concentrates on just that fraction. However, the gene trap still needed further refinement before it was ready for use in fishing out axon guidance molecules, said Tessier-Lavigne. In early studies, we found that mice with trapped neuronal genes didnt show proper axon staining, he said. Thus, the researchers had a difficult time exploring the effects that specific gene mutations had on brain wiring. In trying to fix the problem, Tessier-Lavigne and his colleagues inserted an additional marker (PLAP ) in the gene-trap system. The presence of PLAP stains axons purple. This modified gene-trap strategy enabled us to mutate a gene for a guidance molecule receptor, and by including the PLAP marker, we were able to see the purple-stained altered neuronal wiring and rapidly assess what has gone wrong with the wiring process, said Tessier-Lavigne. Using the modified gene-trapping technique, the researchers produced 46 lines of mice with defined defects in axon guidance molecules, said Tessier-Lavigne. With these mice, not only have we proven that we can trap genes that are specifically expressed in the nervous system, but we can also see discrete patterns of axonal labeling, and we can uncover mutant phenotypes, he said. Specifically, studies on genes, called Sema6A and EphA4, demonstrated that the trapping method could identify axon guidance mutants. With EphA4, we showed that we could re-derive a known mutant, and with Sema6A we showed that we could use the technique to discover a new mutant that affects only a small subset of axons in an otherwise normal nervous system, said Tessier-Lavigne. These results suggest that the new gene-trapping method will enable a rapid increase in understanding the strategy neurons use in wiring the developing brain. It has been shown that neurons that project their axons to a particular area follow a code of transcription factor activation that presumably activates genes for surface receptors that, in turn, dictate what the axon does, said Tessier-Lavigne. Were hoping that this method can help identify the underlying code by focusing very specifically on receptors involved in axon guidance and finding their expression patterns as well as their mutant phenotypes. Furthermore, the mutant mouse lines produced by this technique should also aid attempts to map the normal wiring of the brain. These mouse lines have very specific populations of axons that are labeled purple, said Tessier-Lavigne. In some cases its the first time that a marker has been identified for those axons, and those markers provide a valuable resource for people who want to study the normal wiring pattern of the brain. MORE HEADLINES INSTITUTE NEWS 10.24.05| Seven HHMI Researchers Elected to Institute of Medicine 10.20.05| Eighth Group Leader Selected for Janelia Farm 09.30.05| New Bioethics Resources Available Versin en espaol AT HHMI Chemical Scissors May Fine-Tune Nerve Cell Migration (08.24.00) Errant Nerve Cells Risk A Clockwork Death (10.20.99) Simple Chemical Switches Steer Migrating Neurons (09.09.98) New Class of Molecular Cues Guides Nervous System Wiring (03.19.99) Crossing the Line (02.12.98) Back to Top Home | About HHMI | Press Room | Employment | Contact 2005 Howard Hughes Medical Institute. 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AncestorsMeave Leakey discusses her team's recent skull find suggesting a new human ancestor.
National Geographic News @ nationalgeographic.com Search news.nationalgeographic.com Sign up for our free e-mail newsletter Also see: Today's Top Stories This Story The Environment - Related Sites Stories - E-mail this story Sponsored in part by Meave Leakey Discusses Skull Find Suggesting New Human Ancestor National Geographic News (April 18, 2001) In Kenya, a team headed by Meave Leakey and supported by the National Geographic Society recently discovered the remains of a 3.5 million-year-old skull of what appears to be a completely new species of early human ancestor. In an interview aired on the television news show National Geographic Today, anchor Tom Foreman talks with Leakey about the discovery. More News Adventure Exploration Archaeology Paleontology Kids News Animals Nature Science Technology People Culture The Environment Travel National Geographic Channel Special Series Emerging Explorers TravelWatch National Geographic Out There Oceans Pulse of the Planet Tell me, in laymen's terms, why your discovery is so important? Leakey: I thinkfor a long time people have expected to see diversity going back in timefurther than we had seen before. And this is the first evidence that Australopithecus afarensis such as "Lucy," the skeleton that was found in Ethiopia, actually lived contemporaneously with another species. Previously, it had been one such line evolving from probably as far back as 6 million years until 2.5 million years. Why do you think so many people have wanted to believe that man came from one ancestor? You feel the evidence suggests there would be more than one ancestor. Leakey: I think historically it's partly human arrogance. It took a long time for humans to accept that we ever had a common ancestor with apes. Having accepted that, they still like to see us as a single lineage. But now I think more and more people are accepting that we had a past first like other mammals and other animalsas diverse, [with] many species, some becoming extinct, some living. But we're the one remaining out of this diverse past. How does it complicate things that there aren't many, many, many specimens to choose from, but only a handful of specimens of ancient man or hominids? Leakey: That's a problem. There are very, very few fossils, and the chance of something first of all being fossilized and then being found by somebody today, because it's been exposed, is very rare and remote. So we're seeing little windows into the past, and we're also seeing a fraction of what actually happened. So we have to be very careful when we interpret what we have that we're really looking as closely as we can for the truth. Do you think there is a chance that other things will be found that will radically shake existing theories? Leakey: I don't think "radically shake" the existing theories. I think the story fills out, and as you fill out the story, you have to make adjustments here and there. But I think the basic, basic theory of evolution isnot going to change. And I think we have evolved from a diverse past to one species living today, we have a common origin from Africa. I don't think that will change. Your family has been so dedicated to this for so long. How much have the tools of your work changed? How much easier or complicated is it now to find these specimens, to analyze them? To know something about them? Leakey: Well, the finding hasn't changed except that we can use [Global Positioning System] and get better fixes where we are. But the sort of crowding around the surface and looking and that long, slow process of finding something hasn't changed at all. The way you analyze what you find has changed enormously. We now have so many ways we can look at our specimens and so many ways we can interpret our specimens that we find we have to work with a large number of colleagues and scientists from all over, having different approaches, so that we build up a picture from a much more interdisciplinary team and therefore get a much better picture. Do you think it's providing more answers or more questions by being able to do that? Leakey: The more answers we have, the more questions we have, and the more you find, the more questions you have. So certainly, we have many more questions now than when it was a simple picture of one single lineage with just a few species. Now we have many questions. You and your family have spent so much time doing this, it is such a passion for you. Why do you care about this so very much that you go through the hardship, the time in the field and all this work over all these years? Leakey: I think it's the curiosity, really. One is basically really curious, and if you have questions you want answers. That's what makes the human race what we are. If you know there's a way to find an answer, you go out and find it. You have to keep doing that. Is this to you the elemental question of man, where we came from? Leakey: To me it's something I find enormously curious, and I just really want to know the answer. So, yes, I think I want to know. I'm never going to know all the answers, but at least I can add a little bit of information. Related Stories New Face Added to Humankind's Family Tree Comments? Contact the news desk . Map Map Machine: Africa News Home Write the Editor | Advertise with Us | Masthead | nationalgeographic.com E-mail Updates | Press Room | Privacy Policy More to see at nationalgeographic.com 2004 National Geographic Society. All rights reserved.
GeneticsThe British Medical Journal publishes a special edition "putting genetics into perspective".
Putting genetics in perspective -- Zimmern et al. 322 (7293): 1005 -- BMJ Home Help Search Archive Feedback Table of Contents Author Keyword(s) Vol Page [Advanced] This article Extract PDF Respond to this article Read responses to this article Alert me when this article is cited Alert me when responses are posted Alert me when a correction is posted View citation map Services Email this article to a friend Find similar articles in BMJ Find similar articles in PubMed Add article to my folders Download to citation manager Read articles citing this article Google Scholar Articles by Zimmern, R. Articles by Richards, T. Articles citing this Article PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Zimmern, R. Articles by Richards, T. Related content Other Public Health Other communication Genetics UK government Related Articles BMJ 2001;322:1005-1006 (28April) Editorials Putting genetics in perspective Requires better understanding and more rational debate How will genetics affect society? Is it a science without clear application, or will it bring important health gains? Should we be hugely excited about its potential or worry about the ethical dilemmas it poses? Unquestionably views are polarised, 1 2 as this special issue of the BMJ reflects. The impact on health and health care of the sequencing of the human genome has been well rehearsed. 3 Our understanding and categorisation of disease will be enhanced. Drug therapy may become safer and more effective as treatments are tailored to take account of individual responses to drugs. Genetic tests will increasingly be used to predict the risk of disease and initiate preventive action. Drug development will become faster and more efficient. Yet hidden among these simple statements lurks great complexity. Extrapolating from single gene disorders such as Huntington's disease to predict how genetics might affect future health care will mislead. In this disorder the detection of an abnormal variant or mutation in the relevant gene is highly predictive of disease. But in other single gene disorders, such as hereditary haemochromatosis, predicting clinical outcome is harder for it is modified by both other genes and environmental factors. Genetic factors are even more subtle in the way they contribute to most common diseases. 4 These develop because of interactions between many genes with low penetrance and environmental factors, and individual genetic variants may have little predictive power. These complexities are often not appreciated and the media tends to suggest that genetic factors are highly deterministic. 5 Dissecting the genetic and environmental influences on common diseases presents a huge and long-term challenge. Success will depend on cooperation between governments, research councils, universities, and the commercial sector. It requires vast collections of community based population data and bioinformatic, biostatistic, epidemiological, and sequencing data. The Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust initiative to establish a database of half a million individuals in the United Kingdom population is one example. It will analyse variations in individual genomes and exposure to environmental factors such as smoking and correlate these with the development of disease. 6 All countries must consider introducing statutory frameworks to regulate genetic technologies. These frameworks should be robust enough to protect patient and public interests but balanced enough to allow new developments, including predictive tests, gene therapies, and reproductive technologies. Contentious issues raised by patents, confidentiality of data, insurance and employment, and private sector provision of genetic services raise concerns that must be addressed rationally and openly. 7 What of the impact of advances in genetics on health services? In the UK the NHS will certainly need to adapt by forging closer partnerships between medical geneticists and other specialties and educating staff. A national approach to service development is needed, and last week's news that the government will publish its first green paper on genetics is welcome (p 1018 ). 8 Awareness that demand for services may exceed resources and capacity is behind the recent establishment by the Department of Health of the Genetics Commissioning Advisory Group. The group will develop mechanisms for evaluating and setting priorities for genetic technologies within the NHS. As genetic testing becomes more widespread, molecular genetic and cytogenetic laboratories could provide a service similar to chemical pathology, accessed directly by clinicians. All specialists will have to become familiar with the genetic factors underlying the diseases they see. General practitioners will need to acquire specific skills, including assessing genetic risk (p 1027 ). 9 Geneticists will continue to have a unique role because of their expertise in counselling and long term management of patients with genetic disorders. All must recognise that individuals may not want to undergo predictive testing or change their behaviour in accordance with risk predictions (p 1056 ). 10 In time, health promotion programmes may take into account individual susceptibility to disease and provide more individualised approaches to behavioural change. Public health professionals will need to explore how genetic factors influence health and disease in populations and target interventions, such as screening programmes, at genetically defined subpopulations to improve their efficiency. 11 Public health genetics, the application of advances in genetic science to improve health and prevent disease, is beginning to have an influence in the UK and the United States. 10 Policy development must inevitably take into account issues wider than health and health services because the consequences of genetics for society reach beyond the boundaries of health services. Politicians and policy makers must therefore learn more about this complex science so that they can provide responses based on fact and evidence rather than prejudice and misunderstanding. Public interest in genetic information and genetic tests is likely to grow. Health professionals need to understand the scope and limitations of genetic technologies and the controversial issues they raise. They, more than any other group, have a responsibility to promote public understanding and help their patients distinguish between hype and reality. RonZimmern , director. Public Health Genetics Unit, Strangeways Research Laboratory, Cambridge CB1 8RN ( ronz{at}srl.cam.ac.uk ) JonEmery , clinical lecturer. General Practice and Primary Care Research Unit, Institute of Public Health, Cambridge CB2 2SR ( jde10{at}medschl.cam.ac.uk ) TessaRichards , associate editor. BMJ( trichards{at}bmj.com ) 1. Holtzman NA, Marteau TM. Will genetics revolutionize medicine? N Engl J Med 2000; 343: 141-144 [Free FullText] . 2. Collins FS. Medical and societal consequences of the human genome project. N Engl J Med 1999; 341: 28-37 [Free FullText] . 3. Zimmern R, Cook C. Genetics and health: policy issues for genetic science and their implications for health and health services. London: Stationery Office, 2000. 4. Sorensen TIA, Echwald SM. Obesity genes. BMJ 2001; 322: 630-631 [Free FullText] . 5. Lewontin R. It ain't necessarily so: the dream of the human genome and other illusions. London: Granta, 2000.. 6. Ferriman A. House of Lords supports first UK genetic database. BMJ 2001; 322: 755 [Free FullText] . 7. Human Genetics Commission. Whose hands on your genes? A discussion document on the storage protection and use of personal health information. London: Department of Health, 2000. 8. Jones J. Milburn challenges NHS to exploit genetics revolution. BMJ 2001; 322: 1018 [Free FullText] . 9. Emery J, Hayflick S. The challenge of integrating genetic medicine into primary care. BMJ 2001; 322: 1027-1030 [Free FullText] . 10. Marteau TM, Lerman C. Genetic risk and behavioural change. BMJ 2001; 322: 1056-1059 [Free FullText] . 11. Khoury MJ, Burke W, Thomson EJ. Genetics and public health in the 21st century: using genetic information to improve health and prevent disease. In: New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. BMJ 2001 Related Articles Milburn challenges NHS to exploit genetics revolution Judy Jones BMJ 2001 322: 1018. [Extract] [Full Text] The challenge of integrating genetic medicine into primary care Jon Emery and Susan Hayflick BMJ 2001 322: 1027-1030. [Full Text] Genetic risk and behavioural change Theresa M Marteau and Caryn Lerman BMJ 2001 322: 1056-1059. [Extract] [Full Text] This article has been cited by other articles: ( Search Google Scholar for Other Citing Articles ) J. Little, M. J. Khoury, L. Bradley, M. Clyne, M. Gwinn, B. Lin, M.-L. Lindegren, and P. Yoon The Human Genome Project Is Complete. How Do We Develop a Handle for the Pump? Am. J. Epidemiol., April15,2003; 157(8): 667 - 673. [Full Text] [PDF] Rapid Responses: Read all Rapid Responses Altering the Gene Pool - Rights and Responsibility K R Sethuraman bmj.com, 27 Apr 2001 [Full text] Potential danger of knowledge Gisli Ragnarsson bmj.com, 9 May 2001 [Full text] This article Extract PDF Respond to this article Read responses to this article Alert me when this article is cited Alert me when responses are posted Alert me when a correction is posted View citation map Services Email this article to a friend Find similar articles in BMJ Find similar articles in PubMed Add article to my folders Download to citation manager Google Scholar Articles by Zimmern, R. Articles by Richards, T. Articles citing this Article PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Zimmern, R. Articles by Richards, T. Related content Other Public Health Other communication Genetics UK government Related Articles Home Help Search Archive Feedback Table of Contents 2001 BMJ Publishing Group Ltd
Teenage boys are embracing fatherhoodScientists have found that boys aged between 11 and 14 unconsciously change the way they cradle babies, a sign of their emerging parental instincts.
Telegraph newspaper online Login or register | Free e-mail services | Make us your homepage Search Our site Web Search Our site Web 28112005 telegraph.co.uk News Sport Business Personal Finance Travel Motoring Living Jobs SPECIAL REPORTS Energy Saving Trust Climate change: BP Canon Puzzles i-can win Vodafone Software Microsoft Office Business Travel Announcements Arts Books Business Search Classified Adverts Crossword Dating Education Expat Fashion Gardening Health Obituaries Opinion Podcast Property Science Shop Weather Wine Advertising Press Office Promotions Mobile About Us Email Us Site Map NEWS LATEST Saddam trial resumes Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has clashed with the judge as his trial for human rights violations resumed following a 40-day break. Two Britons killed in ambush British aid worker abducted Scrap two-tier pensions Well over a third of people believe that public sector workers under 50 should have their retirement age raised to 65, according to a YouGov survey. N Korea demands reactor project compensation Fears over return of Best's body to Belfast Paul McCartney vows never to perform in China SPORT LATEST Giles gamble for England "A 60 or 70 per cent fit Ashley Giles is a decent enough performer to be in any England team," says captain Michael Vaughan ahead of the crucial third Test against Pakistan. In pics: England salvage draw Warne stars for Australia Live cricket scoreboard Winter tour squads Newcastle expect Owen return In pics: Premiership action Your View: Premiership forum Fantasy Football Six Nations hearing for Moody In pics Moody red mars victory In pics: Hatton unifies belts In pics: Kiwis win Tri-Nations Complete picture gallery index Sport in full FROM TODAY'S PRINT EDITION UK NEWS Police investigate video of beaten marine Blair brushes off minister's call for swift exit We are not being served UK news in full INTERNATIONAL NEWS Blair targets new EU states with budget cut March for girl set alight after marriage refusal Iran's weblogs - the new voice of dissidents International news in full BUSINESS NEWS Rexam weighs up 3bn French takeover Brown proffers regulatory 'olive branch' Ofgem seeks EU price rigging inquiry Business news in full OPINION Rachel Sylvester: Who's in charge? Philip Johnston: Home front Jim White: Best's tabloid battle Opinion in full SPORT Absolutely no sentiment at the bottom World champions need to up tempo Bloodied Hatton is put in healing hands Sport in full EXPAT Frozen pensions case to go to Europe A quest for culinary authenticity Silver surfers put website into the top 10 Expat in full OBITUARIES Jacques Poirier Benedikt Isserlin TELEGRAPH SERVICES Free e-mail services Telegraph Promotions Weekly Telegraph subscription PREVIOUS INSIDE TODAY SNAP AND SEND You can now have your photographs published by the Daily Telegraph. Follow the link above to find out how. PODCAST DOWNLOADS Hear our leading columnists as well as read them - on your PC or iPod. And they're free. Today: Alan Hansen, Anthony King and Ruth Lea. NEWS ON THE GO Our daily updates are getting better. Headlines can now be sent to your BlackBerry three times a day - for FREE. TRAVEL My kind of town: Bombay Iraq plans theme park MOTORING Buyers' guide: Hyundai Coup Prepare your car for winter PERSONAL FINANCE The pet insurance puzzle Free credit switches to end YESTERDAY'S RESULTS FOOTBALL Premiership Everton 1 Newcastle 0 Fulham 2 Bolton 1 Middlesbrough 2 West Brom 2 West Ham 1 Man Utd 2 RUGBY UNION Guinness Premiership Bristol 22 Sale 14 Newcastle 17 Wasps 15 FEATURES How good is the food I give my children? One mini-roll of two? A nutritionist analyses the weekly diets of three different families Still a player Hugh Hefner and his three girlfriends star in a new reality TV show 'Touch the present' Why an illustration by Przemek Sobocki transcends the genre Sledges and saunas The lowdown on Lapland's Christmas for the whole family Hymn to the East End A day in the life of a Londoner, as seen by pop band Saint Etienne Simon Armitage The poet talks about about Jerusalem and chimp's tea parties A girl's best friend? Is Mazda MX-5 fan Erin Baker impressed by the latest version? Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005. Terms Conditions of reading. Commercial information. Privacy and Cookie Policy.
Fear makes worms turn friendlyA single gene influences the social behaviour of worms.
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Bottlenose dolphins and theory of mindBottlenose dolphins can recognize themselves in a mirror, an advanced intellectual ability observed previously only in humans and apes.
Mirror self-recognition in the bottlenose dolphin: A case of cognitive convergence -- Reiss and Marino, 10.1073 pnas.101086398 -- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Published online before print May 1, 2001, 10.1073 pnas.101086398 This Article Full Text Full Text (PDF) Supplemental Movies Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to My File Cabinet Download to citation manager Cited by other online articles Request Copyright Permission Google Scholar Articles by Reiss, D. Articles by Marino, L. Articles citing this Article PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Reiss, D. Articles by Marino, L. Psychology Mirror self-recognition in the bottlenose dolphin: A case of cognitive convergence Diana Reiss*, , , and Lori Marino , *Osborn Laboratories of Marine Sciences, New York Aquarium, Wildlife Conservation Society, Brooklyn, NY 11224; Center for Environmental Research and Conservation, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027; and Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology Program, The Center for Behavioral Neuroscience, and The Living Links Center for the Advanced Study of Ape and Human Evolution, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322 Communicated by Donald R.Griffin, The Rockefeller University, New York, NY, February 20,2001 (received for review October 3,2000) The ability to recognize oneself in a mirror is an exceedingly rare capacity in the animal kingdom. To date, only humans and great apes have shown convincing evidence of mirror self-recognition. Two dolphins were exposed to reflective surfaces, and both demonstrated responses consistent with the use of the mirror to investigate marked parts of the body. This ability to use a mirror to inspect parts of the body is a striking example of evolutionary convergence with great apes and humans. D.R. and L.M. contributed equally to this work. To whom reprint requests should be addressed. E-mail: dlr28{at}columbia.edu . www.pnas.org cgi doi 10.1073 pnas.101086398 This article has been cited by other articles in HighWire Press -hosted journals: ( Search Google Scholar for Other Citing Articles ) F. B. M. de Waal, M. Dindo, C. A. Freeman, and M. J. Hall Inaugural Article: The monkey in the mirror: Hardly a stranger PNAS, August9,2005; 102(32): 11140 - 11147. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] J. M. Siegel The REM Sleep-Memory Consolidation Hypothesis Science, November2,2001; 294(5544): 1058 - 1063. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] Current Issue | Archives | Online Submission | Info for Authors | Editorial Board | About Subscribe | Advertise | Contact | Site Map Copyright 2001 by the National Academy of Sciences
"The Mind as the Software of the Brain" by Ned BlockCognitive scientists often say that the mind is the software of the brain. This chapter is about what this claim means.
"The Mind as the Software of the Brain" by Ned Block The Mind as the Software of the Brain Ned Block New York University 1. Machine Intelligence 2. I ntelligence and Intentionality 3. Functionalism and the Language of Thought 4. Searle's Chinese Room Argument Cognitive scientists often say that the mind is the software of the brain. This chapter is about what this claim means. 1.Machine Intelligence In this section, we will start with an influential attempt to define `intelligence', and then we will move to a consideration of how human intelligence is to be investigated on the machine model. The last part of the section will discuss the relation between the mental and the biological. 1.1The Turing Test One approach to the mind has been to avoid its mysteries by simply defining the mental in terms of the behavioral. This approach has been popular among thinkers who fear that acknowledging mental states that do not reduce to behavior would make psychology unscientific, because unreduced mental states are not intersubjectively accessible in the manner of the entities of the hard sciences. "Behaviorism", as the attempt to reduce the mental to the behavioral is called, has often been regarded as refuted, but it periodically reappears in new forms. Behaviorists don't define the mental in terms of just plain behavior, since after all something can be intelligent even if it has never had the chance to exhibit its intelligence. Behaviorists define the mental not in terms of behavior, but rather behavioral dispositions, the tendency to emit certain behaviors given certain stimuli. It is important that the stimuli and the behavior be specified non-mentalistically. Thus, intelligence could not be defined in terms of the disposition to give sensible responses to questions, since that would be to define a mental notion in terms of another mental notion (indeed, a closely related one). To see the difficulty of behavioristic analyses, one has to appreciate how mentalistic our ordinary behavioral descriptions are. Consider, for example, throwing. A series of motions that constitute throwing if produced by one mental cause might be a dance to get the ants off if produced by another. An especially influential behaviorist definition of intelligence was put forward by A. M. Turing (1950). Turing, one of the mathematicians who cracked the German code during World War II, formulated the idea of the universal Turing machine, which contains, in mathematical form, the essence of the programmable digital computer. Turing wanted to define intelligence in a way that applied to both men and machines, and indeed, to anything that is intelligent. His version of behaviorism formulates the issue of whether machines could think or be intelligent in terms of whether they could pass the following test: a judge in one room communicates by teletype (This was 1950!) with a computer in a second room and a person in a third room for some specified period. (Let's say an hour.) The computer is intelligent if and only if the judge cannot tell the difference between the computer and the person. Turing's definition finessed the difficult problem of specifying non-mentalistically the behavioral dispositions that are characteristic of intelligence by bringing in the discrimination behavior of a human judge. And the definition generalizes. Anything is intelligent just in case it can pass the Turing test. Turing suggested that we replace the concept of intelligence with the concept of passing the Turing test. But what is the replacement for? If the purpose of the replacement is practical, the Turing test is not enormously useful. If one wants to know if a machine does well at playing chess or diagnosing pneumonia or planning football strategy, it is better to see how the machine performs in action than to make it take a Turing test. For one thing, what we care about is that it do well at detecting pneumonia, not that it do it in a way indistinguishable from the way a person would do it. So if it does the job, who cares if it doesn't pass the Turing test? A second purpose might be utility for theoretical purposes. But machines that can pass the Turing test such as Weizenbaum's ELIZA (see below) have been dead ends in artificial intelligence research, not exciting beginnings. (See "Mimicry versus Exploration" in Marr 1977, and Shieber, 1994.) A third purpose, the one that comes closest to Turing's intentions, is the purpose of conceptual clarification. Turing was famous for having formulated a precise mathematical concept that he offered as a replacement for the vague idea of mechanical computability. The precise concept (computability by a Turing machine) did everything one would want a precise concept of mechanical computability to do. No doubt, Turing hoped that the Turing test conception of intelligence would yield everything one would want from a definition of intelligence without the vagueness of the ordinary concept. Construed as a proposal about how to make the concept of intelligence precise, there is a gap in Turing's proposal: we are not told how the judge is to be chosen. A judge who was a leading authority on genuinely intelligent machines might know how to tell them apart from people. For example, the expert may know that current intelligent machines get certain problems right that people get wrong. Turing acknowledged this point by jettisoning the claim that being able to pass the Turing Test is a necessary condition of intelligence, weakening his claim to: passing the Turing Test is a sufficient condition for intelligence. He says "May not machines carry out something which ought to be described as thinking but which is very different from what a man does? This objection is a very strong one, but at least we can say that if, nevertheless, a machine can be constructed to play the imitation game satisfactorily, we need not be troubled by this objection" (p. 435) In other words, a machine that does pass is necessarily intelligent, even if some intelligent machines fail. But the problem of how to specify the qualities of the judge goes deeper than Turing acknowledges, and compromises the Turing test as a sufficient condition too. A stupid judge, or one who has had no contact with technology, might think that a radio was intelligent. People who are naive about computers are amazingly easy to fool, as was demonstrated in the First Turing Test at the Boston Computer Museum in 1991. (See Shieber, 1994) A version of Weizenbaum's ELIZA (described in the next paragraph) was classified as human by five of ten judges. The test was "restricted" in that the computer programmers were given specific topics that their questions would be restricted to, and the judges were forbidden to ask "tricky" questions. For example, if the topic were Washington D.C., a judge was not supposed to ask questions like "Is Washington D.C. bigger than a bread box". However, the winning program's topic was "whimsical conversation", a "smart-aleck" way of interacting that all the judges fell in with immediately, and one that would have had the same effect, even without set topics. Further, the restrictions to non-tricky questions weren't enforced. (I speak as one of the referees who failed to enforce them.) For the most part, the computer-naive judges didn't really know how to formulate a tricky question. Thus the variant of ELIZA may be regarded as having done well in an unrestricted Turing test. Variants on ELIZA (all written by Joseph Weintraub) also were victorious in the Second and Third Turing Tests. The upshot is that a completely stupid computer program has already been shown to pass a reasonable facsimile of a Turing Test. ELIZA is a simple program written by Joseph Weizenbaum that in one version imitates a psychiatrist. See Weizenbaum (1976). It employs a group of simple but effective strategies. For example, it looks for "key words" on a list supplied by the programmer, e.g., `I', `you', `alike', `father', and `everybody'. The words are ordered; for example, `father' comes before `everybody', so if you type in "My father is afraid of everybody," the machine will spit back one of its "father" responses, such as "WHAT ELSE COMES TO MIND WHEN YOU THINK OF YOUR FATHER?" If you type in "Everybody laughed at me," you will get one of its responses to `everybody', such as "WHO IN PARTICULAR ARE YOU THINKING OF?" It also has techniques that simultaneously transform `you' into `I', and `me' into `you' so that if you type in "You don't agree with me," it can reply: "WHY DO YOU THINK THAT I DON'T AGREE WITH YOU?" It also stores sentences containing certain key words such as `my'. If your current input contains no key words, but if you earlier said "My boyfriend made me come here," the program will say "DOES THAT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE?" It also has stock responses to `Parlez vous Francais' (or any other sentence with `Francais' in it), namely "I SPEAK ONLY ENGLISH". If all else fails, the machine has a list of last ditch responses such as "WHO IS THE PSYCHIATRIST HERE, YOU OR ME?" This type of program is easy to trip up if you know how it works. For example, in the First Turing Test, one judge said "You're trying to make this difficult for me aren't you?" and the program replied roughly as follows: "Would you prefer it if it was not true that you're trying to make this difficult for you aren't you?" As Shieber points out, the pronoun transposition rules can't handle "tag questions" that end with, e.g. "aren't you?" The point that this program illustrates is that a simple program can be extraordinarily successful in activities akin to passing the Turing Test. @comment Weizenbaum reports@note{Personal communication} that a computer scientist who knew all about the program sent him a computer message while Weizenbaum was taking a nap but had the psychiatrist mode engaged. The colleague was asking Weizenbaum to logout, because Weizenbaum was tying up the computer without using it, and the colleague wanted wanted to use the machine. The colleague's messages were answered by ELIZA, and the conversation might have gone as follows. (I got ELIZA's responses to these questions from a PC version of the program.)"Joe, will you please logout." WE WERE DISCUSSING YOU, NOT ME "I need to use the computer." DO COMPUTERS WORRY YOU? "No, computers don't worry me." WHAT DO YOU THINK MACHINES HAVE TO DO WITH YOUR PROBLEM? "Come off it." WHY DO YOU SAY THAT? The colleague, a professional who knew all about ELIZA had no idea that he wasn't talking to a human, and called Weizenbaum in a rage. Weizenbaum's program is not sophisticated or complex by current standards (there is a PC version that is only 200 lines in BASIC) yet this type of program is better at passing the Turing Test than anything else written to date, as is shown by the three victories in a row in the Turing Tests mentioned above. Imagine how convincing a program would be produced if the Defence budget were devoted to this task for a year! But even if a high budget government initiative produced a program that was good at passing the Turing Test, if the program was just a bundle of tricks like the Weizenbaum program, with question types all thought of in advance, and canned responses placed in the machine, the machine would not be intelligent. One way of dealing with the problem of the specification of the judge is to make some sort of characterization of the mental qualities of the judge part of the formulation of the Turing Test. For example, one might specify that the judge be moderately knowledgeable about computers and good at thinking, or better, good at thinking about thinking. But including a specification of the mental qualities of the judge in the description of the test will ruin the test as a way of defining the concept of intelligence in non-mentalistic terms. Further, if we are going to specify that the judge be good at thinking about thinking, we might just as well give up on having the judge judge which contestants are humans or machines and just have the judge judge which contestants think. And then what the idea of the Turing Test would amount to is: a machine thinks if our best thinkers (about thinking) think it thinks. Although this sounds like a platitude, it is actually false. For even our best thinkers are fallible. The most that can be claimed is that if our best thinkers think that something thinks, then it is rational for us to believe that it does. I've made much of the claim that judges can be fooled by a mindless machine that is just a bag of tricks. "But," you may object, "How do we know that we are not just a bag of tricks". Of course, in a sense perhaps we are, but that isn't the sense relevant to what is wrong with the Turing Test. To see this point, consider the ultimate in unintelligent Turing Test passers, a hypothetical machine that contains all conversations of a given length in which the machine's replies make sense. Let's stipulate that the test lasts one hour. Since there is an upper bound on how fast a human typist can type, and since there are a finite number of keys on a teletype, there is an upper bound on the "length" of a Turing Test conversation. Thus there are a finite (though more than astronomical) number of different Turing Test conversations, and there is no contradiction in the idea of listing them all. Let's call a string of characters that can be typed in an hour or less a "typable" string. In principle, all typable strings could be generated, and a team of intelligent programmers could throw out all the strings which cannot be interpreted as a conversation in which at least one party (say the second contributor) is making sense. The remaining strings (call them the sensible strings) could be stored in an hypothetical computer (say, with marks separating the contributions of the separate parties), which works as follows. The judge types in something. Then the machine locates a string that starts with the judge's remark, spitting back its next element. The judge then types something else. The machine finds a string that begins with the judge's first contribution, followed by the machine's, followed by the judge's next contribution (the string will be there since all sensible strings are there), and then the machine spits back its fourth element, and so on. (We can eliminate the simplifying assumption that the judge speaks first by recording pairs of strings; this would also allow the judge and the machine to talk at the same time.) Of course, such a machine is only logically possible, not physically possible. The number of strings is too vast to exist, and even if they could exist, they could never be accessed by any sort of a machine in anything like real time. But since we are considering a proposed definition of intelligence that is supposed to capture the concept of intelligence, conceptual possibility will do the job. If the concept of intelligence is supposed to be exhausted by the ability to pass the Turing Test, then even a universe in which the laws of physics are very different from ours should contain exactly as many unintelligent Turing test passers as married bachelors, namely zero. Note that the choice of one hour as a limit for the Turing Test is of no consequence, since the procedure just described works for any finite Turing Test. The following variant of the machine may be easier to grasp. The programmers start by writing down all typable strings, call them A1...An. Then they think of just one sensible response to each of these, which we may call B1...Bn. (Actually, there will be fewer Bs than As because some of the As will take up the entire hour.) The programmers may have an easier time of it if they think of themselves as simulating some definite personality, say my Aunt Bubbles, and some definite situation, say Aunt Bubbles being brought into the teletype room by her strange nephew and asked to answer questions for an hour. So each of the Bs will be the sort of reply Aunt Bubbles would give to the preceeding A. For example, if A73 is "Explain general relativity", B73 might be "Ask my nephew, he's the professor." What about the judge's replies to each of the Bs? The judge can give any reply up to the remaining length limit, so below each of the Bs, there will sprout a vast number of Cs (vast, but fewer than the number of Bs, since the time remaining has decreased). The programmers' next task is to produce just one D for each of the Cs. So if the B just mentioned is followed by a C which is "xyxyxyxyxyxyxy!" (Remember, the judge doesn't have to make sense), the programmers might make the following D "My nephew warned me that you might type some weird messages". Think of conversations as paths downward through a tree, starting with an Ai from the judge, a reply, Bi from the machine, and so on. See Figure 1. For each Ai-Bi-Cij that is a beginning to a conversation, the programmers must produce a D that makes sense given the A, B, and C that precede it. Figure 1: A conversation is any path from the top to the bottom. The machine works as follows. The judge goes first. Whatever the judge types in (typos and all) is one of A1...An. The machine locates the particular A, say A2398, and then spits back B2398, a reply chosen by the programmers to be appropriate to A2398. The judge types another message, and the machine again finds it in the list of Cs that sprout below B2398, and then spits back the pre-recorded reply (which takes into account what was said in A2398 and B2398). And so on. Though the machine can do as well in the one hour Turing Test as Aunt Bubbles, it has the intelligence of a juke-box. Every clever remark it produces was specifically thought of by the programmers as a response to the previous remark of the judge in the context of the previous conversation. Though this machine is too big to exist, there is nothing incoherent or contradictory about its specification, and so it is enough to refute the behaviorist interpretation of the Turing Test that I have been talking about. 1 Note that there is an upper bound on how long any particular Aunt Bubbles machine can go on in a Turing Test, a limit set by the length of the strings it has been given. Of course real people have their upper limits too, given that real people will eventually quit or die. However, there is a very important difference between the Aunt Bubbles machine and a real person. We can define `competence' as idealized performance. Then, relative to appropriate idealizations, it may well be that real people have an infinite competence to go on. That is, if humans were provided with unlimited memory and with motivational systems that give passing the Turing test infinite weight, they could go on for ever (at least according to conventional wisdom in cognitive science). This is definitely not the case for the Aunt Bubbles machine. But this difference provides no objection to the Aunt Bubbles machine as a refutation of the Turing Test conception of intelligence, because the notion of competence is not behavioristically acceptable, requiring as it does for its specification, a distinction among components of the mind. For example, the mechanisms of thought must be distinguished from the mechanisms of memory and motivation. "But," you may object, "isn't it rather chauvinist to assume that a machine must process information in just the way we do to be intelligent?" Answer: Such an assumption would indeed be chauvinist, but I am not assuming it. The point against the Turing Test conception of intelligence is not that the Aunt Bubbles machine wouldn't process information the way we do, but rather that the way it does process information is unintelligent despite its performance in the Turing Test. Ultimately, the problem with the Turing test for theoretical purposes is that it focuses on performance rather than on competence. Of course, performance is evidence for competence, but the core of our understanding of the mind lies with mental competence, not behavioral performance. The behviorist cast of mind that leads to the Turing test conception of intelligence also leads to labeling the sciences of the mind as "the behavioral sciences". But as Chomsky (1959) has pointed out, that is like calling physics the science of meter readings. 1.2Two Kinds of Definitions of Intelligence We have been talking about an attempt to define intelligence using the resources of the Turing Test. However, there is a very different approach to defining intelligence To explain this approach, it will be useful to contrast two kinds of definitions of water. One might be better regarded as a definition of the word `water'. The word might be defined as the colorless, odorless, tasteless liquid that is found in lakes and oceans. In this sense of `definition', the definition of `water' is available to anyone who speaks the language, even someone who knows no science. But one might also define water by saying what water really is, that is, by saying what physico-chemical structure in fact makes something pure water. The answer to this question would involve its chemical constitution: H2O. Defining a word is something we can do in our armchair, by consulting our linguistic intuitions about hypothetical cases, or, bypassing this process, by simply stipulating a meaning for a word. Defining (or explicating) the thing is an activity that involves empirical investigation into the nature of something in the world. What we have been discussing so far is the first kind of definition of intelligence, the definition of the word, not the thing. Turing's definition is not the result of an empirical investigation into the components of intelligence of the sort that led to the definition of water as H2O. Rather, he hoped to avoid muddy thinking about machine intelligence by stipulating that the word `intelligent' should be used a certain way, at least with regard to machines. Quite a different way of proceeding is to investigate intelligence itself as physical chemists investigate water. We will consider how this might be done in the next section, but first we should note a complication. There are two kinds (at least) of kinds: structural kinds such as water or tiger, and functional kinds such as mouse-trap or gene. A structural kind has a "hidden compositional essence"; in the case of water, the compositional essence is a matter of its molecules consisting of two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule. Functional kinds, by contrast, have no essence that is a matter of composition. A certain sort of function, a causal role, is the key to being a mousetrap or a carburetor. (The full story is quite complex: something can be a mousetrap because it is made to be one even if it doesn't fulfill that function very well.) What makes a bit of DNA a gene is its function with respect to mechanisms that can read the information that it encodes and use this information to make a biological product. Now the property of being intelligent is no doubt a functional kind, but it still makes sense to investigate it experimentally, just as it makes sense to investigate genes experimentally. One topic of investigation is the role of intelligence in problem solving, planning, decision making, etc. Just what functions are involved in a functional kind is often a difficult and important empirical question. The project of Mendelian genetics has been to investigate the function of genes at a level of description that does not involve their molecular realizations. A second topic of investigation is the nature of the realizations that have the function in us, in humans: DNA in the case of genes. Of course, if there are Martians, their genes may not be composed of DNA. Similarly, we can investigate the functional details and physical basis of human intelligence without attention to the fact that our results will not apply to other mechanisms of other hypothetical intelligences. 1.3Functional Analysis Both types of projects just mentioned can be pursued via a common methodology, a methodology sometimes known as functional analysis. Think of the human mind as represented by an intelligent being in the head, a "homunculus". Think of this homunculus as being composed of smaller and stupider homunculi, and each of these being composed of still smaller and still stupider homunculi until you reach a level of completely mechanical homunculi. (This picture was first articulated in Fodor(1968); see also, Dennett (1974) and Cummins (1975).) Suppose one wants to explain how we understand language. Part of the system will recognize individual words. This word-recognizer might be composed of three components, one of which has the task of fetching each incoming word, one at a time, and passing it to a second component. The second component includes a dictionary, i.e., a list of all the words in the vocabulary, together with syntactic and semantic information about each word. This second component compares the target word with words in the vocabulary (perhaps executing many such comparisons simultaneously) until it gets a match. When it finds a match, it sends a signal to a third component whose job it is to retrieve the syntactic and semantic information stored in the dictionary. This speculation about how a model of language understanding works is supposed to illustrate how a cognitive competence can be explained by appeal to simpler cognitive competences, in this case, the simple mechanical operations of fetching and matching. The idea of this kind of explanation of intelligence comes from attention to the way computers work. Consider a computer that multiplies m times n by adding m to zero n times. Here is a program for doing this. Think of m and n as represented in the registers M and N in Figure 2. Register A is reserved for the answer, a. First, a representation of 0 is placed in the register A. Second, register N is examined to see if it contains (a representation of) 0. If the answer is yes, the program halts and the correct answer is 0. (If n = 0, m times n = 0.) If no, N is decremented by 1 (so register N now contains a representation of n-1), and (a representation of) m is added to the answer register, A. Then, the procedure loops back to the second step: register N is checked once again to see if its value is 0; if not, it is again decremented by 1, and again m is added to the answer register. This procedure continues until N finally has the value 0, at which time m will have been added to the answer register exactly n times. At this point, the answer register contains a representation of the answer. Figure 2: Program for multiplying. One begins the multiplication by putting representations of m and n, the numbers to be multiplied, in registers M and N. At the end of the computation, the answer will be found in register A. See the text for a description of how the program works. This program multiplies via a "decomposition" of multiplication into other processes, namely addition, subtraction of 1, setting a register to 0, and checking a register for 0. Depending on how these things are themselves done, they may be further decomposable, or they may be the fundamental bottom-level processes, known as primitive processes. The cognitive science definition or explication of intelligence is analogous to this explication of multiplication. Intelligent capacities are understood via decomposition into a network of less intelligent capacities, ultimately grounded in totally mechanical capacities executed by primitive processors. The concept of a primitive process is very important; the next section is devoted to it. 1.4Primitive Processors What makes a processor primitive? One answer is that for primitive processors, the question "How does the processor work?" is not a question for cognitive science to answer. The cognitive scientist answers "How does the multiplier work?" in the case of the multiplier described above by giving the program or the information flow diagram for the multiplier. But if components of the multiplier, say the gates of which the adder is composed, are primitive, then it is not the cognitive scientist's business to answer the question of how such a gate works. The cognitive scientist can say: "That question belongs in another discipline, electronic circuit theory." Distinguish the question of how something works from the question of what it does. The question of what a primitive processor does is part of cognitive science, but the question of how it does it is not. This idea can be made a bit clearer by looking at how a primitive processor actually works. The example will involve a common type of computer adder, simplified so as to add only single digits. To understand this example, you need to know the following simple facts about binary notation: 2 0 and 1 are represented alike in binary and normal (decimal) notation, but the binary representation that corresponds to decimal `2' is `10'. Our adder will solve the following four problems: 0 + 0 = 0 1 + 0 = 1 0 + 1 = 1 1 + 1 = 10 The first three equations are true in both binary and decimal, but the last is true only if understood in binary. The second item of background information is the notion of a gate. An "AND" gate is a device that accepts two inputs, and emits a single output. If both inputs are `1's, the output is a `1'; otherwise, the output is a `0'. An "EXCLUSIVE-OR" (either but not both) gate is a "difference detector": it emits a `0' if its inputs are the same (i.e., `1' `1' or `0' `0'), and it emits a `1' if its inputs are different (i.e., `1' `0' or `0' `1') This talk of `1' and `0' is a way of thinking about the "bistable" states of computer representers. These representers are made so that they are always in one or the other of two states, and only momentarily in between. (This is what it is to be bistable.) The states might be a 4 volt and a 7 volt potential. If the two input states of a gate are the same (say 4 volts), and the output is the same as well (4 volts), and if every other combination of inputs yields the 7 volt output, then the gate is an AND gate, and the 4 volt state realizes `1'. (Alternatively, if the 4 volt state is taken to realize `0', the gate is an "inclusive or" (either or both) gate.) A different type of AND gate might be made so that the 7 volt state realized `1'. The point is that `1' is conventionally assigned to whatever bistable physical state of an AND gate it is that has the role mentioned, i.e. `1' is conventionally assigned to whatever state it is such that two of them as inputs yields another one as output, and nothing else yields that output. And all that counts about an AND gate from a computational point of view is its input-output function, not how it works or whether 4 volts or 7 volts realizes a `1'. Note the terminology I have been using: one speaks of a physical state (4-volt potential) as "realizing" a computational state (having the value `1'). This distinction between the computational and physical levels of description will be important in what follows, especially in section 3. Here is how the adder works. The two digits to be added are connected both to an AND gate and to an EXCLUSIVE OR gate as illustrated in Figures 3a and 3b. Let's look at 3a first. The digits to be added are `1' and `0', and they are placed in the input register, which is the top pair of boxes. The EXCLUSIVE-OR gate, which, you recall is a difference detector, sees different things, and so outputs a `1' to the rightmost box of the answer register which is the bottom pair of boxes. The AND gate outputs a `0' except when it sees two `1's, and so it outputs a `0'. In this way, the circuit computes `1 + 0 = 1'. For this problem, as for `0 + 1 = 1' and `0 + 0 =0', the EXCLUSIVE-OR gate does all the real work. The role of the AND gate in this circuit is carrying, and that is illustrated in Figure 3b. The digits to be added, `1' and `1' are placed in the top register again. Now, both inputs to the AND gate are `1's, and so the AND gate outputs a `1' to the leftmost box of the answer (bottom) register. The EXCLUSIVE-OR gate puts a `0' in the rightmost box, and so we have the correct answer, `10'. Figure 3: (a) Adder doing 1 + 0 = 1; (b) Adder doing 1 + 1= 10. The borders between scientific disciplines are notoriously fuzzy. No one can say exactly where chemistry stops and physics begins. Since the line between the upper levels of processors and the level of primitive processors is the same as the line between cognitive science and one of the "realization" sciences such as electronics or physiology, the boundary between the levels of complex processors and the level of primitive processors will have the same fuzziness. Nonetheless, in this example we should expect that the gates are the primitive processors. If they are made in the usual way, they are the largest components whose operation must be explained, not in terms of cognitive science, but rather in terms of electronics or mechanics or some other realization science. Why the qualification "If they are made in the usual way"? It would be possible to make an adder each of whose gates were whole computers, with their own multipliers, adders and normal gates. It would be silly to waste a whole computer on such a simple task as that of an AND gate, but it could be done. In that case, the real level of primitives would not be the gates of the original adder, but rather the (normal) gates of the component computers. Primitive processors are the only computational devices for which behaviorism is true. Two primitive processors (such as gates) count as computationally equivalent if they have the same input-output function, i.e., the same actual and potential behavior, even if one works hydraulically, and the other electrically. But computational equivalence of non-primitive devices is not to be understood in this way. Consider two multipliers that work via different programs. Both accept inputs and emit outputs only in decimal notation. One of them converts inputs to binary, does the computation in binary, and then converts back to decimal. The other does the computation directly in decimal. These are not computationally equivalent multipliers despite their identical input-output functions. If the mind is the software of the brain, then we must take seriously the idea that the functional analysis of human intelligence will bottom out in primitive processors in the brain. 1.5The Mental and the Biological One type of electrical AND gate consists of two circuits with switches arranged as in Figure 4. The switches on the left are the inputs. When only one or neither of the input switches is closed, nothing happens, because the circuit on the left is not completed. Only when both switches are closed does the electromagnet go on, and that pulls the switch on the right closed, thereby turning on the circuit on the right. (The circuit on the right is only partially illustrated.) In this example, a switch being closed realizes `1'; it is the bistable state that obtains as an output if and only if two of them are present as an input. Another AND gate is illustrated in Figure 5. If neither of the mice on the left are released into the right hand part of their cages, or if only one of the mice is released, the cat does not strain hard enough to pull the leash. But when both are released, and are thereby visible to the cat, the cat strains enough to lift the third mouse's gate, letting it into the cheesy part of its box. So we have a situation in which a mouse getting cheese is output if and only if two cases of mice getting cheese are input. Figure 4: Electrical AND gate. Open = 0, closed = 1 Figure 5: Cat and mouse AND gate. Hungry mouse = 0, mouse fed = 1 The point illustrated here is the irrelevance of hardware realization to computational description. These gates work in very different ways, but they are nonetheless computationally equivalent. And of course, it is possible to think of an indefinite variety of other ways of making a primitive AND gate. How such gates work is no more part of the domain of cognitive science than is the nature of the buildings that hold computer factories. This reveals a sense in which the computer model of the mind is profoundly un-biological. We are beings who have a useful and interesting biological level of description, but the computer model of the mind aims for a level of description of the mind that abstracts away from the biological realizations of cognitive structures. As far as the computer model goes, it does not matter whether our gates are realized in gray matter, switches, or cats and mice. Of course, this is not to say that the computer model is in any way incompatible with a biological approach. Indeed, cooperation between the biological and computational approaches is vital to discovering the program of the brain. Suppose one were presented with a computer of alien design and set the problem of ascertaining its program by any means possible. Only a fool would choose to ignore information to be gained by opening the computer up to see how its circuits work. One would want to put information at the program level together with information at the electronic level, and likewise, in finding the program of the human mind, one can expect biological and cognitive approaches to complement one another. Nonetheless, the computer model of the mind has a built-in anti-biological bias, in the following sense. If the computer model is right, we should be able to create intelligent machines in our image--our computational image, that is. And the machines we create in our computational image may not be biologically similar to us. If we can create machines in our computational image, we will naturally feel that the most compelling theory of the mind is one that is general enough to apply to both them and us, and this will be a computational theory, not a biological theory. A biological theory of the human mind will not apply to these machines, though the biological theory will have a complementary advantage: namely, that such a biological theory will encompass us together with our less intelligent biological cousins, and thus provide a different kind of insight into the nature of human intelligence. Both approaches can accomodate evolutionary considerations, though in the case of the computational paradigm, evolution is no more relevant to the nature of the mind than the programmers intentions are to the nature of a computer program. 2Intelligence and Intentionality Our discussion so far has centered on the computational approach to one aspect of the mind, intelligence. But there is a different aspect of the mind that we have not yet discussed, one that has a very different relation to computational ideas, namely intentionality. For our purposes, we can take intelligence to be a capacity, a capacity for various intelligent activities such as solving mathematics problems, deciding whether to go to graduate school, and figuring out how spaghetti is made. (Notice that this analysis of intelligence as a capacity to solve, figure out, decide, and the like, is a mentalistic analysis, not a behaviorist analysis.) Intentionality is aboutness. Intentional states represent the world as being a certain way. The thought that the moon is full and the perceptual state of seeing that the moon is full are both about the moon and they both represent the moon as being full. So both are intentional states. We say that the intentional content of both the thought and the perceptual state is that the moon is full. A single intentional content can have very different behavioral effects, depending on its relation to the person who has the content. For example, the fear that there will be nuclear war might inspire one to work for disarmament, but the belief that there will be nuclear war might influence one to emigrate to Australia. (Don't let the spelling mislead you: intending is only one kind of intentional state. Believing and desiring are others.) Intentionality is an important feature of many mental states, but many philosophers believe it is not "the mark of the mental." There are bodily sensations, the experience of orgasm, for example, that are genuine mental states but have no intentional content. (Well, maybe there is a bit of intentional content to this experience, e.g. locational content, but the phenomenal content of the experience, what it is like to have it, is clearly not exhausted by that that intentional content.) The features of thought just mentioned are closely related to features of language. Thoughts represent, are about things, and can be true or false; and the same is true of sentences. The sentence `Bruce Springsteen was born in the USSR' is about Springsteen, represents him as having been born in the Soviet Union, and is false. It would be surprising if the intentional content of thought and of language were independent phenomena, and so it is natural to try to reduce one to the other or to find some common explanation for both. We will pursue this idea below, but before we go any further, let's try to get clearer about just what the difference is between intelligence and intentionality. One way to get a handle on the distinction between intelligence and intentionality is to note that in the opinion of many writers on this topic, you can have intentionality without intelligence. Thus John McCarthy (the creator of the artificial intelligence language LISP) holds that thermostats have intentional states in virtue of their capacity to represent and control temperature (McCarthy, 1980). And there is a school of thought that assigns content to tree rings in virtue of their representing the age of the tree. But no school of thought holds that the tree rings are actually intelligent. An intelligent system must have certain intelligent capacities, capacities to do certain sorts of things, and tree rings can't do these things. Less controversially, words on a page and images on a TV screen have intentionality. For example, my remark earlier in this paragraph to the effect that McCarthy created LISP is about McCarthy. But words on a page have no intelligence. Of course, the intentionality of words on a page is only derived intentionality, not original intentionality. (See Searle, 1980 and Haugeland, 1980) Derived intentional content is inherited from the original intentional contents of intentional systems such as you and me. We have a great deal of freedom in giving symbols their derived intentional content. If we want to, we can decide that `McCarthy' will now represent Minsky or Chomsky. Original intentional contents are the intentional contents that the representations of an intentional system have for that system. Such intentional contents are not subject to our whim. Words on a page have derived intentionality, but they do not have any kind of intelligence, not even derived intelligence, whatever that would be. Conversely, there can be intelligence without intentionality. Imagine that an event with negligible (but importantly, non-zero) probability occurs: In their random movement, particles from the swamp come together and by chance result in a molecule-for-molecule duplicate of your brain. The swamp brain is arguably intelligent, because it has many of the same capacities that your brain has. If we were to hook it up to the right inputs and outputs and give it an arithmetic problem, we would get an intelligent response. But there are reasons for denying that it has the intentional states that you have, and indeed, for denying that it has any intentional states at all. For since we have not hooked it up to input devices, it has never had any information from the world. Suppose your brain and it go through an identical process, a process that in your case is the thinking of the thought that Bernini vandalized the Pantheon. The identical process in the swamp-brain has the phenomenal features of that thought, in the sense of `phenomenal content' indicated in the discussion of orgasm above. What it is like for you to think the thought is just what it is like for the swamp-brain. But, unlike you, the swamp-brain has no idea who Bernini was, what the Pantheon is, or what vandalizing is. No information about Bernini has made any kind of contact with the swamp-brain; no signals from the Pantheon have reached it either. Had it a mouth, it would merely be mouthing words. So no one should be happy with the idea that the swamp-brain is thinking the thought that Bernini vandalized the Pantheon. The upshot: what makes a system intelligent is what it can do, what it has the capacity to do. So intelligence is future-oriented. What makes a system an intentional system, by contrast, is in part a matter of its causal history; it must have a history that makes its states represent the world, i.e., have aboutness. Intentionality has a past-oriented requirement. A system can satisfy the future-oriented needs of intelligence while flunking the past-oriented requirement of intentionality. (Philosophers disagree about just how future-oriented intentionality is, whether thinking about something requires the ability to "track" it; but there should be little disagreement that there is some past-oriented component.) Now let's see what the difference between intelligence and intentionality has to do with the computer model of the mind. Notice that the method of functional analysis that explains intelligent processes by reducing them to unintelligent mechanical processes does not explain intentionality. The parts of an intentional system can be just as intentional as the whole system. (See Fodor (1981)) In particular, the component processors of an intentional system can manipulate symbols that are about just the same things that the symbols manipulated by the whole system are about. Recall that the multiplier of Figure 2 was explained via a decomposition into devices that add, subtract and the like. The multiplier's states were intentional in that they were about numbers. The states of the adder, subtractor, etc., are also about numbers and are thus similarly intentional. There is, however, an important relation between intentionality and functional decomposition which will be explained in the next section. As you will see, though the multiplier's and the adder's states are about numbers, the gate's representational states represent numerals, and in general the subject matter of representations shift as we cross the divide from complex processors to primitive processors. 2.1The Brain as a Syntactic Engine Driving a Semantic Engine To see the idea of the brain as a syntactic engine it is important to see the difference between the number 1 and the symbol (in this case, a numeral or digit) `1'. Certainly, the difference between the city, Boston, and the word `Boston' is clear enough. The former has bad drivers in it; the latter has no people or cars at all, but does have six letters. No one would confuse a city with a word, but it is less obvious what the difference is between the number 1 and the numeral `1'. The point to keep in mind is that many different symbols, e.g., `II' (in Roman numerals), and `two' (in alphabetical writing) denote the same number, and one symbol, e.g., `10', can denote different numbers in different counting systems (as `10' denotes one number in binary and another in decimal). With this distinction in mind, one can see an important difference between the multiplier and the adder discussed earlier. The algorithm used by the multiplier in Figure 2 is notation independent: Multiply n by m by adding n to zero m times works in any notation. And the program described for implementing this algorithm is also notation-independent. As we saw in the description of this program in section 1.3, the program depends on the properties of the numbers represented, not the representations themselves. By contrast, the internal operation of the adder described in Figures 3A and 3B depends on binary notation, and its description in section 1.4 speaks of numerals (note the quotation marks and italics) rather than numbers. Recall that the adder exploits the fact that an EXCLUSIVE-OR gate detects symbol differences, yielding a `1' when its inputs are different digits, and a `0' when its inputs are the same digits. This gate gives the right answer all by itself so long as no carrying is involved. The trick used by the EXCLUSIVE OR gate depends on the fact that when you add two digits of the same type (`1' and `1' or `0' and `0') the rightmost digit of the answer is the same. This is true in binary, but not in other standard notations. For example, it is not true in familiar decimal notation. (1+1=2, but 0+0=0) The inputs and outputs of both the multiplier and the adder must be seen as referring to numbers. One way to see this is to note that otherwise one could not see the multiplier as exploiting an algorithm involving multiplying numbers by adding numbers. What are multipled and added are numbers. But once we go inside the adder, we must see the binary states as referring to symbols themselves. For as just pointed out, the algorithms are notation-dependent. This change of subject matter is even more dramatic in some computational devices, in which there is a level of processing in which the algorithms operate over parts of decimal numerals. Consider, for example, a calculator, in which the difference between an `8' and a `3' is a matter of 2 small segments on the left of the `8' being turned off to make a `3'. In calculators, there is a level at which the algorithms concern these segments. This fact gives us an interesting additional characterization of primitive processors. Typically, as we functionally decompose a computational system, we reach a point where there is a shift of subject matter from abstractions like numbers or from things in the world to the symbols themselves. The inputs and outputs of the adder and multiplier refer to numbers, but the inputs and outputs of the gates refer to numerals. Typically, this shift occurs when we have reached the level of primitive processors. The operation of the higher level components such as the multiplier can be explained in terms of a program or algorithm which is manipulating numbers. But the operation of the gates cannot be explained in terms of number manipulation; they must be explained in symbolic terms (or at lower levels, e.g., in terms of electromagnets). At the most basic computational level, computers are symbol-crunchers, and for this reason the computer model of the mind is often described as the symbol manipulation view of the mind. Seeing the adder as a syntactic engine driving a semantic engine requires noting two functions: one maps numbers onto other numbers, and the other maps symbols onto other symbols. The symbol function is concerned with the numerals as symbols--without attention to their meanings. Here is the symbol function: `0', `0' -- `0' ` 0', `1' -- `1' ` 1', `0' -- `1' ` 1', `1' -- `10' The idea is that we interpret something physical in a machine or its outputs as symbols, and some other physical aspect of the machine as indicating that the symbols are inputs or outputs. Then given that interpretation, the machine's having some symbols as inputs causes the machine to have other symbols as outputs. For example, having the pair `0', `0' as inputs causes having `0' as an output. So the symbol function is a matter of the causal structure of the machine under an interpretation. This symbol function is mirrored by a function that maps the numbers represented by the numerals on the left onto the numbers represented by the numerals on the right. This function will thus map numbers onto numbers. We can speak of this function that maps numbers onto numbers as the semantic function (semantics being the study of meaning), since it is concerned with the meanings of the symbols, not the symbols themselves. (It is important not to confuse the notion of a semantic function in this sense with a function that maps symbols onto what they refer to; the semantic function maps numbers onto numbers, but the function just mentioned which often goes by the same name would map symbols onto numbers.) Here is the semantic function (in decimal notation--you must choose some notation to express a semantic function): 0, 0 -- 0 0, 1 -- 1 1, 0 -- 1 1, 1 -- 2 Notice that the two specifications just given differ in that the first maps quoted entities onto other quoted entities. The second has no quotes. The first function maps symbols onto symbols; the second function maps the numbers referred to by the arguments of the first function onto the numbers referred to by the values of the first function. (A function maps arguments onto values.) The first function is a kind of linguistic "reflection" of the second. The key idea behind the adder is that of an isomorphism between these two functions. The designer has found a machine which has physical aspects that can be interpreted symbolically, and under that symbolic interpretation, there are symbolic regularities: some symbols in inputs result in other symbols in outputs. These symbolic regularities are isomorphic to rational relations among the semantic values of the symbols of a sort that are useful to us, in this case the relation of addition. It is the isomorphism between these two functions that explains how it is that a device that manipulates symbols manages to add numbers. Now the idea of the brain as a syntactic engine driving a semantic engine is just a generalization of this picture to a wider class of symbolic activities, namely the symbolic activities of human thought. The idea is that we have symbolic structures in our brains, and that nature (evolution and learning) has seen to it that there are correlations between causal interactions among these structures and rational relations among the meanings of the symbolic structures. A crude example: the way we avoid swimming in shark-infested water is the brain symbol structure `shark' causes the brain symbol structure `danger'. (What makes `danger' mean danger will be discussed below.) The primitive mechanical processors "know" only the "syntactic" forms of the symbols they process (e.g., what strings of zeroes and ones they see), and not what the symbols mean. Nonetheless, these meaning-blind primitive processors control processes that "make sense"--processes of decision, problem solving, and the like. In short, there is a correlation between the meanings of our internal representations and their forms. And this explains how it is that our syntactic engine can drive our semantic engine. 3 The last paragraph mentioned a correlation between causal interactions among symbolic structures in our brains and rational relations among the meanings of the symbol structures. This way of speaking can be misleading if it encourages the picture of the neuroscientist opening the brain, just seeing the symbols, and then figuring out what they mean. Such a picture inverts the order of discovery, and gives the wrong impression of what makes something a symbol. The way to discover symbols in the brain is first to map out rational relations among states of mind, and then identify aspects of these states that can be thought of as symbolic in virtue of their functions. Function is what gives a symbol its identity, even the symbols in English orthography, though this can be hard to appreciate because these functions have been rigidified by habit and convention. In reading unfamiliar handwriting, we may notice an unorthodox symbol, someone's weird way of writing a letter of the alphabet. How do we know which letter of the alphabet it is? By its function! Th% function of a symbol is som%thing on% can appr%ciat% by s%%ing how it app%ars in s%nt%nc%s containing familiar words whos% m%anings w% can gu%ss. You will have little trouble figuring out, on this basis, what letter in the last sentence was replaced by `%'. 2.2Is a Wall a Computer? John Searle (1990) argues against the computationalist thesis that the brain is a computer. He does not say that the thesis is false, but rather that it is trivial, because, he suggests, everything is a computer; indeed, everything is every computer. In particular, his wall is a computer computing Wordstar. (See also Putnam, 1988, for a different argument for a similar conclusion.) The points of the last section allow easy understanding of the motivation for this claim and what is wrong with it. In the last section we saw that the key to computation is an isomorphism. We arrange things so that, if certain physical states of a machine are understood as symbols, then causal relations among those symbol-states mirror useful rational relations among the meanings of those symbols. The mirroring is an isomorphism. Searle's claim is that this sort of isomorphism is cheap. We can regard two aspects of the wall at time t as the symbols `0' and `1', and then we can regard an aspect of the wall at time t + 1 as `1', and so the wall just computed 0+1=1. Thus, Searle suggests, everything (or rather everything that is big or complex enough to have enough states) is every computer, and the claim that the brain is a computer has no bite. The problem with this reasoning is that the isomorphism that makes a syntactic engine drive a semantic engine is more full-bodied than Searle acknowledges. In particular, the isomorphism has to include not just a particular computation that the machine does perform, but all the computations that the machine could have performed. The point can be made clearer by a look at Figure 6, a type of X-or gate. (See O'Rourke and Shattuck, forthcoming.) Figure 6: The numerals at the beginning of arrows indicate inputs. The numerals at the beginnings of arrows represent inputs. The computation of 1 + 0 = 1 is represented by the path A-- C-- E. The computation of 0+1 = 1 is represented by the path A-- B-- E, and so on. Now here is the point. In order for the wall to be this computer, it isn't enough for it to have states that correspond to `0' and `1' followed by a state that corresponds to `1'. It must also be such that had the `1' input been replaced by a `0' input, the `1' output would have been replaced by the `0' output. In other words, it has to have symbolic states that satisfy not only the actual computation, but also the possible computations that the computer could have performed. And this is non-trivial. Searle (1992, p. 209) acknowledges this point, but insists nonetheless that there is no fact of the matter of whether the brain is a specific computer. Whether something is a computer, he argues, depends on whether we decide to interpret its states in a certain way, and that is up to us. "We can't, on the one hand, say that anything is a digital computer if we can assign a syntax to it, and then suppose there is a factual question intrinsic to its physical operation whether or not a natural system such as the brain is a digital computer." Searle is right that whether something is a computer and what computer it is is in part up to us. But what the example just given shows is that it is not totally up to us. A rock, for example, is not an X-OR gate. We have a great deal of freedom as to how to interpret a device, but there are also very important restrictions on this freedom, and that is what makes it a substantive claim that the brain is a computer of a certain sort. 3Functionalism and the Language of Thought Thus far, we have (1) considered functional analysis, the computer model of the mind's approach to intelligence, (2) distinguished intelligence from intentionality, and (3) considered the idea of the brain as a syntactic engine. The idea of the brain as a syntactic engine explains how it is that symbol-crunching operations can result in a machine "making sense". But so far, we have encountered nothing that could be considered the computer model's account of intentionality. It is time to admit that although the computer model of the mind has a natural and straightforward account of intelligence, there is no account of intentionality that comes along for free. We will not survey the field here. Instead, let us examine a view which represents a kind of orthodoxy, not in the sense that most researchers believe it, but in the sense that the other views define themselves in large part by their response to it. The basic tenet of this orthodoxy is that our intentional contents are simply meanings of our internal representions. As noted earlier, there is something to be said for regarding the content of thought and language as a single phenomenon, and this is a quite direct way of so doing. There is no commitment in this orthodoxy on the issue of whether our internal language, the language in which we think, is the same or different from the language with which we speak. Further, there is no commitment as to a direction of reduction, i.e., as to which is more basic, mental content or meanings of internal symbols. For concreteness, let us talk in terms of Fodor's (1975) doctrine that the meaning of external language derives from the content of thought, and the content of thought derives from the meaning of elements of the language of thought. (See also Harman, 1973.) According to Fodor, believing or hoping that grass grows is a state of being in one or another computational relation to an internal representation that means that grass grows. This can be summed up in a set of slogans: believing that grass grows is having `Grass grows.' in the Belief Box, desiring that grass grows is having this sentence (or one that means the same) in the Desire Box, etc. Now if all content and meaning derives from meaning of the elements of the language of thought, we immediately want to know how the mental symbols get their meaning. 4 This is a question that gets wildly different answers from different philosophers, all equally committed to the cognitive science point of view. We will briefly look at two of them. The first point of view, mentioned earlier, takes as a kind of paradigm those cases in which a symbol in the head might be said to covary with states in the world in the way that the number of rings in a tree trunk correlates with the age of the tree. (See Dretske, 1981, Stampe, 1977, Stalnaker, 1984, and Fodor, 1987, 1990.) On this view, the meaning of mental symbols is a matter of the correlations between these symbols and the world. One version of this view (Fodor, 1990) says that T is the truth condition of a mental sentence M if and only if: M is in the Belief Box if and only if T, in ideal conditions. That is, what it is for `Grass is green' to have the truth condition that grass be green is for `Grass is green' to appear in the Belief Box just in case grass really is green (and conditions are ideal). The idea behind this theory is that there are cognitive mechanisms that are designed to put sentences in the Belief Box when and only when they are true, and if those cognitive mechanisms are working properly and the environment cooperates (no mirages, no Cartesian evil demons), these sentences will appear in the Belief Box when and only when they are true. One problem with this idea is that even if this theory works for "observation sentences" such as `This is yellow', it is hard to see how it could work for "theoretical sentences." A person's cognitive mechanisms could be working fine, and the environment could contain no misleading evidence, and still, one might not believe that space is Riemannian or that some quarks have charm or that one is in the presence of a magnetic field. For theoretical ideas, it is not enough to have one's nose rubbed in the evidence: you also have to have the right theoretical idea. And if the analysis of ideal conditions includes "has the right theoretical idea", that would make the analysis circular because having the right theoretical idea amounts to "comes up with the true theory". And appealing to truth in an analysis of `truth' is to move in a very small circle. (See Block, 1986,p 657-660.) The second approach is known as functionalism (actually, "functional role semantics" in discussions of meaning) in philosophy, and as procedural semantics in cognitive psychology and computer science. Functionalism says that what gives internal symbols (and external symbols too) their meanings is how they function. To maximize the contrast with the view described in the last two paragraphs, it is useful to think of the functionalist approach with respect to a symbol that doesn't (on the face of it) have any kind of correlation with states of the world, say the symbol `and'. Part of what makes `and' mean what it does is that if we are sure of `Grass is green and grass grows', we find the inference to `Grass is green' and also `Grass grows' compelling. And we find it compelling "in itself", not because of any other principle. (See Peacocke, 1993) Or if we are sure that one of the conjuncts is false, we find compelling the inference that the conjunction is false too. What it is to mean AND by `and' is to find such inferences compelling in this way, and so we can think of the meaning of `and'as a matter of its behavior in these and other inferences. The functionalist view of meaning applies this idea to all words. The picture is that the internal representations in our heads have a function in our deciding, deliberating, problem solving--indeed in our thought in general--and that is what their meanings consist in. This picture can be bolstered by a consideration of what happens when one first learns Newtonian mechanics. In my own case, I heard a large number of unfamiliar terms more or less all at once: `mass', `force', `energy', and the like. I never was told definitions of these terms in terms I already knew. (No one has ever come up with definitions of such "theoretical terms" in observation language.) What I did learn was how to use these terms in solving homework problems, making observations, explaining the behavior of a pendulum, and the like. In learning how to use the terms in thought and action (and perception as well, though its role there is less obvious), I learned their meanings, and this fits with the functionalist idea that the meaning of a term just is its function in perception, thought and action. A theory of what meaning is can be expected to jibe with a theory of what it is to acquire meanings, and so considerations about acquisition can be relevant to semantics. An apparent problem arises for such a theory in its application to the meanings of numerals. After all, it is a mathematical fact that truths in the familiar numeral system `1',`2',`3'... are preserved, even if certain non-standard interpretations of the numerals are adopted (so long as non-standard versions of the operations are adopted too). For example, `1' might be mapped onto 2, `2' onto 4, `3' onto 6, and so on. That is, the numerals, both "odd" and "even", might be mapped onto the even numbers. Since `1' and `2' can have the same functional role in different number systems and still designate the very numbers they usually designate in normal arithmetic, how can the functional role of `1' determine whether `1' means 1 or 2? It would seem that all functional role could do is "cut down" the number of possible interpretations, and if there are still an infinity left after the cutting down, functional role has gained nothing. A natural functionalist response would be to emphasize the input and output ends of the functional roles. We say "two cats" when confronted with a pair of cats, not when confronted with one or five cats, and our thoughts involving the symbol `3' affect our actions towards triples in an obvious way in which these thoughts do not affect our actions towards octuples. The functionalist can avoid non-standard interpretations of internal functional roles by including in the semantically relevant functional roles external relations involving perception and action (Harman, 1973). In this way, the functionalist can incorporate the insight of the view mentioned earlier that meaning has something to do with covariation between symbols and the world. The emerging picture of how cognitive science can handle intentionality should be becoming clear. Transducers at the periphery and internal primitive processors produce and operate on symbols so as to give them their functional roles. In virtue of their functional roles (both internal and external), these symbols have meanings. The functional role perspective explains the mysterious correlation between the symbols and their meanings. It is the activies of the symbols that gives them their meanings, so it is no mystery that a syntax-based system should have rational relations among the meanings of the system's symbols. Intentional states have their relations in virtue of these symbolic activities, and the contents of the intentional states of the system, thinking, wanting etc, are inherited from the meanings of the symbols. This is the orthodox account of intentionality for the computer model of the mind. It combines functionalism with a commitment to a language of thought. Both views are controversial, the latter both in regard to its truth and its relevance to intentionality even if true. Note, incidentally, that on this account of intentionality, the source of intentionality is computational structure, independently of whether the computational structure is produced by software or hardware. Thus the title of this chapter, in indicating that the mind is the software of the brain has the potential to mislead. If we think of the computational structure of a computer as coming entirely from a program put into a structureless general purpose machine, we are very far from the facts about the human brain--which is not such a general purpose machine. At the end of this chapter, we will discuss Searle's famous Chinese Room argument, which is a direct attack on this theory. The next two sections will be devoted to arguments for and against the language of thought. 3.1Objections to the Language of Thought Theory Many objections have been raised to the language of thought picture. Let us briefly look at three objections made by Dennett (1975). The first objection is that we all have an infinity of beliefs (or at any rate a very large number of them). For example, we believe that that trees do not light up like fire-flies, and that this book is probably closer to your eyes than the President's left shoe is to the ceiling of the Museum of Modern Art gift shop. But how can it be that so many beliefs are all stored in the rather small Belief Box in your head? One line of response to this objection involves making a distinction between the ordinary concept of belief and a scientific concept of belief towards which one hopes cognitive science is progressing. For scientific purposes, we home in on cases in which our beliefs cause us to do something, say throw a ball or change our mind, and cases in which beliefs are caused by something, as when perception of a rhinocerous causes us to believe that there is a rhinocerous in the vicinity. Science is concerned with causation and causal explanation, so the proto-scientific concept of belief is the concept of a causally active belief. It is only for these beliefs that the language of thought theory is committed to sentences in the head. This idea yields a very simple answer to the infinity objection, namely that on the proto-scientific concept of belief, most of us did not have the belief that trees do not light up like fire-flies until they read this paragraph. Beliefs in the proto-scientific sense are explicit, that is, recorded in storage in the brain. For example, you no doubt were once told that the sun is 93 million miles away from the earth. If so, perhaps you have this fact explicitly recorded in your head, available for causal action, even though until reading this paragraph, this belief hadn't been conscious for years. Such explicit beliefs have the potential for causal interaction, and thus must be distinguished from cases of belief in the ordinary sense (if they are beliefs at all) such as the belief that all normal people have that trees do not light up like fireflies. Being explicit is to be distinguished from other properties of mental states, such as being conscious. Theories in cognitive science tell us of mental representations about which no one knows from introspection, such as mental representations of aspects of grammar. If this is right, there is much in the way of mental representation that is explicit but not conscious, and thus the door is opened to the possibility of belief that is explicit but not conscious. It is important to note that the language of thought theory is not meant to be a theory of all possible believers, but rather only of us. The language of thought theory allows creatures who can believe without any explicit representation at all, but the claim of the language of thought theory is that they aren't us. A digital computer consists of a central processing unit (CPU) that reads and writes explicit strings of zeroes and ones in storage registers. One can think of this memory as in principle unlimited, but of course any actual machine has a finite memory. Now any computer with a finite amount of explicit storage can be simulated by a machine with a much larger CPU and no explicit storage, that is no registers and no tape. The way the simulation works is by using the extra states as a form of implicit memory. So, in principle, we could be simulated by a machine with no explicit memory at all. Consider, for example, the finite automaton diagrammed in Figure 7. The table shows it as having three states. The states, `S1', `S2', and `S3', are listed across the top. The inputs are listed on the left side. Each box is in a column and a row that specifies what the machine does when it is in the state named at the top of the column, and when the input is the one listed at the side of the row. The top part of the box names the output, and the bottom part of the box names the next state. This is what the table says: when the machine is in S1, and it sees a 1, it says "1", and goes to S2. When it is in S2, if it sees a `1' it says "2" and goes into the next state, S3. In that state, if it sees a `1' it says "3" and goes back to S1. When it sees nothing, it says nothing and stays in the same state. This automaton counts "modulo" three, that is, you can tell from what it says how many ones it has seen since the last multiple of three. But what the machine table makes clear is that this machine need have no memory of the sort that involves writing anything down. It can "remember" solely by changing state. Some theories based on neural network models (Volume IV, Ch 3) assume that we are such machines. Figure 7: Finite automaton that counts "modulo" three Suppose, then, that we are digital computers with explicit repesentations. We could be simulated by finite automata which have many more states and no explicit representations. The simulators will have just the same beliefs as we do, but no explicit repesentations (unless the simulators are just juke boxes of the type of the Aunt Bubbles machine described in 1.1). The machine in which remembered items are recorded explicitly has an advantage over a computationally equivalent machine that "remembers" by changing state, namely that the explicit representations can be part of a combinatorial system. This point will be explained in the next section. Time to sum up. The objection was that an infinity of beliefs cannot be written down in the head. My response was to distinguish between a loose and ordinary sense of `belief' in which it may be true that we have an infinity of beliefs, and a proto-scientific sense of `belief' in which the concept of belief is the concept of a causally active belief. In the latter sense, I claimed, we do not have an infinity of beliefs. Even if you agree with this response to the infinity objection, you may still feel dissatisfied with the idea that, because the topic has never crossed their minds, most people don't believe that zebras don't wear underwear in the wild. Perhaps it will help to say something about the relation between the proto-scientific concept of belief and the ordinary concept. It is natural to want some sort of reconstruction of the ordinary concept in scientific terms, a reconstruction of the sort we have when we define the ordinary concept of the weight of a person as the force exerted on the person by the earth at the earth's surface. To scratch this itch, we can give a first approximation to a definition of a belief in the ordinary sense as anything that is either (1) a belief in the proto-scientific sense, or (2) naturally and easily deduced from a proto-scientific belief. A second objection to the language of thought theory is provided by Dennett's example of a chess-playing program that "thinks" it should get its queen out early, even though there is no explicitly represented rule that says anything like "Get your queen out early". The fact that it gets its queen out early is an "emergent" consequence of an interaction of a large number of rules that govern the details of play. But now consider a human analog of the chess playing machine. Shouldn't we say that she believes she should get her queen out early despite her lack of any such explicit representation? The reply to this challenge to the language of thought theory is that in the proto-scientific sense of belief, the chess player simply does not believe that she should get her queen out early. If this seems difficult to accept, note that there is no additional predictive or explanatory force to the hypothesis that she believes she should get her queen out early beyond the predictive or explanatory force of the explicitly represented strategies from which getting the queen out early emerges. (Though there is no additional predictive force, there may be some additional predictive utility, just as there is utility in navigation to supposing that the sun goes around the earth.) Indeed, the idea that she should get her queen out early can actually conflict with her deeply held chess principles, despite being an emergent property of her usual tactics. We could suppose that if you point out to her that her strategies have the consequence of getting her queen out early, she says "Oh no, I'd better revise my usual strategies." So postulating that she believes that she should get her queen out early could lead to mistaken predictions of her behavior. In sum, the proto-scientific concept of a causally active belief can be restricted to the strategies that really are explicitly represented. Perhaps there is a quasi-behaviorist ordinary sense of belief in which it is correct to ascribe the belief that the queen should come out early simply on the basis of the fact that she behaves as if she believes it. Even if we agree to recognize such a belief, it is not one that ever causally affects any other mental states or any behavior, so it is of little import from a scientific standpoint. A third objection to the language of thought theory is provided by the "opposite" of the "queen out early" case, Dennett's sister in Cleveland case. Suppose that a neurosurgeon operates on a someone's Belief Box, inserting the sentence "I have a sister in Cleveland". When the patient wakes up, the doctor says "Do you have a sister?" "Yes", the patient says, "In Cleveland." Doctor: "What's her name?" Patient: "Gosh, I can't think of it." Doctor: "Older or younger?" Patient: "I don't know, and by golly I'm an only child. I don't know why I'm saying that I have a sister at all." Finally, the patient concludes that she never really believed she had a sister in Cleveland, but rather was a victim of some sort of compulsion to speak as if she did. The upshot is supposed to be that the language of thought theory is false because you can't produce a belief just by inserting a sentence in the Belief Box. The objection reveals a misleading aspect of the "Belief Box" slogan, not a problem with the doctrine that the slogan characterizes. According to the language of thought theory, believing that one has a sister in Cleveland is a computational relation to a sentence, but this computational relation shouldn't be thought of as simply storage. Rather, the computational relation must include some specification of relations to other sentences to which one also has the same computational relation, and in that sense the computational relation must be holistic. This point holds both for the ordinary notion of belief and the proto-scientific notion. It holds for the ordinary notion of belief because we don't count someone as believing just because she mouths words the way our neurosurgery victim mouthed the words "I have a sister in Cleveland." And it holds for the proto-scientific notion of belief because the unit of explanation and prediction is much more likely to be groups of coherently related sentences in the brain than single sentences all by themselves. If one is going to retain the "Belief Box" way of talking, one should say that for a sentence in the Belief Box to count as a belief, it should cohere sufficiently with other sentences so as not to be totally unstable, disappearing on exposure to the light. 3.2 Arguments for the Language of Thought So it seems that the language of thought hypothesis can be defended from these a priori objections. But is there any positive reason to believe it? One such reason is that it is part of a reasonably successful research program. But there are challengers (mainly, some versions of the connectionist program mentioned earlier), so a stronger case will be called for if the challengers' research programs also end up being successful. 5 A major rationale for accepting the language of thought has been one or another form of productivity argument, stemming from Chomsky's work (See Chomsky, 1975.) The idea is that people are capable of thinking vast numbers of thoughts that they have not thought before--and indeed that no one may have ever thought before. Consider, for example, the thought mentioned earlier that this book is closer to you than the President's shoe is to the Museum gift shop. The most obvious explanation of how we can think such new thoughts is the same as the explanation of how we can frame the sentences that express them: namely, via a combinatorial system that we think in. Indeed, abstracting away from limitations on memory, motivation, and length of life, there may be no upper bound on the number of thinkable thoughts. The number of sentences in the English language is certainly infinite. But what does it mean to say that sentences containing millions of words are "in principle" thinkable? Those who favor productivity arguments say this: The explanation for the fact that we cannot actually think sentences containing millions of words would have to appeal to such facts as that were we to try to think sufficiently long or complicated thoughts, our attention would flag, or our memory would fail us, or we would die. They think that we can idealize away from these limitations, since the mechanisms of thought themselves are unlimited. But this claim that if we abstract away from memory, mortality, motivation, and the like, our thought mechanisms are unlimited, is a doctrine for which there is no direct evidence. The perspective from which this doctrine springs has been fertile, but it is an open question what aspect of the doctrine is responsible for its success. @comment[Kripke objection: unclear what idealization is. kAlso, we do have evidence from making load easier] After all, we might be finite beings, essentially. Not all idealizations are equally correct, and contrary to widespread assumption in cognitive science, the idealization to the unboundedness of thought may be a bad one. Consider a finite automaton naturally described by the table in Figure 7. 6 Its only form of memory is change of state. If you want to get this machine to count to 4 instead of just to 3, you can't just add more memory, you have to give it another state by changing the way the machine is built. Perhaps we are like this machine. An extension of the productivity argument to deal with this sort of problem has recently been proposed by Fodor (1987), and Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988). Fodor and Pylyshyn point out that it is fact about humans that if someone can think the thought that Mary loves John, then she can also think the thought that John loves Mary. And likewise for a vast variety of pairs of thoughts that involve the same conceptual constituents, but are put together differently. There is a systematicity relation among many thoughts that begs for an explanation in terms of a combinatorial system. The conclusion is that human thought operates in a medium of "movable type". However, the most obvious candidate for the elements of such a combinatorial system in many areas are the external symbol systems themselves. Perhaps the most obvious case is arithmetical thoughts. If someone is capable of thinking the thought that 7 + 16 is not 20, then, presumably she is capable of thinking the thought that 17 + 6 is not 20. Indeed, someone who has mastered the ten numerals plus other basic symbols of Arabic notation and their rules of combination can think any arithmetical thought that is expressible in a representation that he can read. (Note that false propositions can be thinkable--one can think the thought that 2+2 = 5, if only to think that it is false.) One line of a common printed page contains eighty symbols. There are a great many different arithmetical propositions that can be written on such a line--about as many as there are elementary particles in the universe. Though almost all of them are false, all of them are arguably thinkable with some work. Starting a bit smaller, try to entertain the thought that 695,302,222,387,987 + 695,302,222,387,986 = 2. How is it that we have so many possible arithmetical thoughts? The obvious explanation for this is that we can string together--either in our heads or on paper--the symbols (numerals, pluses, etc.) themselves, and simply read the thought off the string of symbols. Of course, this does not show that the systematicity argument is wrong. Far from it, since it shows why it is right. But this point does threaten the value of the systematicity argument considerably. For it highlights the possibility that the systematicity argument may apply only to conscious thought, and not to the rest of the iceberg of unconscious thought processes that cognitive science is mainly about. So Fodor and Pylyshyn are right that the systematicity argument shows that there is a language of thought. And they are right that if connectionism is incompatible with a language of thought, so much the worse for connectionism. But where they are wrong is with respect to an unstated assumption: that the systematicity argument shows that language-like representations pervade cognition. To see this point, note that much of the success in cognitive science has been in our understanding of perceptual and motor modules. The operation of these modules is neither introspectible--accessible to conscious thought--nor directly influencible by conscious thought. These modules are "informationally encapsulated". (See Pylyshyn (1984), and Fodor (1983).) The productivity in conscious thought that is exploited by the systematicity argument certainly does not demonstrate productivity in the processing inside such modules. True, if someone can think that if John loves Mary, then he can think that Mary loves John. But we don't have easy access to such facts about pairs of representations of the kind involved in unconscious processes. Distinguish between the conclusion of an argument and the argument itself. The conclusion of the systematicity argument may well be right about unconscious representations. That is, systematicity itself may well obtain in these systems. My point is that the systematicity argument shows little about encapsulated modules and other unconscious systems. The weakness of the systematicity argument is that, resting as it does on facts that are so readily available to conscious thought, its application to unconscious processes is more tenuous. Nonetheless, as the reader can easily see by looking at any cognitive science textbook, the symbol manipulation model has been quite successful in explaining aspects of perception thought and motor control. So although the systematicity argument is limited in its application to unconscious processes, the model it supports for conscious processes appears to have considerable application to unconscious processes nonetheless. To avoid misunderstanding, I should add that the point just made does not challenge all of the thrust of the Fodor and Pylyshyn critique of connectionism. Any neural network model of the mind will have to accomodate the fact of our use of a systematic combinatorial symbol system in conscious thought. It is hard to see how a neural network model could do this without being in part an implementation of a standard symbol-crunching model. In effect, Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988, p.44) counter the idea that the systematicity argument depends entirely on conscious symbol manipulating by saying that the systematicity argument applies to animals. For example, they argue that the conditioning literature contains no cases of animals that can be trained to pick the red thing rather than the green one, but cannot be trained to pick the green thing rather than the red one. This reply has some force, but it is uncomfortably anecdotal. The data a scientist collects depend on his theory. We cannot rely on data collected in animal conditioning experiments run by behaviorists--who after all, were notoriously opposed to theorizing about internal states. Another objection to the systematicity argument derives from the distinction between linguistic and pictorial representation that plays a role in the controversies over mental imagery. Many researchers think that we have two different representational systems, a language-like system--thinking in words--and a pictorial system--thinking in pictures. If an animal that can be trained to pick red instead of green can also be trained to pick green instead of red, that may reflect the properties of an imagery system shared by humans and animals, not a properly language-like system. Suppose Fodor and Pylyshyn are right about the systematicity of thought in animals. That may reflect only a combinatorial pictorial system. If so, it would suggest (though it wouldn't show) that humans have a combinatorial pictorial system too. But the question would still be open whether humans have a language-like combinatorial system that is used in unconscious thought. In sum, the systematicity argument certainly applies to conscious thought, and it is part of a perspective on unconscious thought that has been fertile, but there are difficulties in its application to unconscious thought. 3.3Explanatory Levels and The Syntactic Theory of the Mind In this section, let us assume that the language of thought hypothesis is correct in order to ask another question: should cognitive science explanations appeal only to the syntactic elements in the language of thought (the `0's and `1's and the like), or should they also appeal to the contents of these symbols? Stich (1983) has argued for the "syntactic theory of mind", a version of the computer model in which the language of thought is construed in terms of uninterpreted symbols, symbols that may have contents, but whose contents are irrelevant for the purposes of cognitive science. I shall put the issue in terms of a critique of a simplified version of the argument of Stich (1983). Let us begin with Stich's case of Mrs. T, a senile old lady who answers "What happened to McKinley?" with "McKinley was assassinated," but cannot answer questions like "Where is McKinley now?", "Is he alive or dead?" and the like. Mrs. T's logical facilities are fine, but she has lost most of her memories, and virtually all the concepts that are normally connected to the concept of assassination, such as the concept of death. Stich sketches the case so as to persuade us that though Mrs. T may know that something happened to McKinley, she doesn't have any real grasp of the concept of assassination, and thus cannot be said to believe that McKinley was assassinated. The argument that I will critique concludes that purely syntactic explanations undermine content explanations because a syntactic account is superior to a content account. There are two respects of superiority of the syntactic approach: first, the syntactic account can handle Mrs. T who has little in the way of intentional content, but plenty of internal representations whose interactions can be used to explain and predict what she does, just as the interactions of symbol structures in a computer can be used to explain and predict what it does. And the same holds for very young children, people with wierd psychiatric disorders, and denizens of exotic cultures. In all these cases, cognitive science can (at least potentially) assign internal syntactic descriptions and use them to predict and explain, but there are problems with content ascriptions (though, in the last case at least, the problem is not that these people have no contents, but just that their contents are so different from ours that we cannot assign contents to them in our terms). In sum, the first type of superiority of the syntactic perspective over the content perspective, is that it allows for the psychology of the senile, the very young, the disordered, and the exotic, and thus, it is alleged, the syntactic perspective is far more general than the content perspective. The second respect of superiority of the syntactic perspective is that it allows more fine-grained predictions and explanations than the content perspective. To take a humdrum example, the content perspective allows us to predict that if someone believes that all men are mortal, and that he is a man, he can conclude that he is mortal. But suppose that the way this person represents the generalization that all men are mortal to himself is via a syntactic form of the type `All non-mortals are non-men'; then the inference will be harder to draw than if he had represented it without the negations. In general, what inferences are hard rather than easy, and what sorts of mistakes are likely will be better predictable from the syntactic perspective than from the content perspective, in which all the different ways of representing one belief are lumped together. The upshot of this argument is supposed to be that since the syntactic approach is more general and more fine-grained than the content approach, content explanations are therefor undermined and shown to be defective. So cognitive science would do well to scrap attempts to explain and predict in terms of content in favor of appeals to syntactic form alone.. But there is a fatal flaw in this argument, one that applies to many reductionist arguments. The fact that syntactic explanations are better than content explanations in some respects says nothing about whether content explanations are not also better than syntactic explanations in some respects. A dramatic way of revealing this fact is to note that if the argument against the content level were correct, it would undermine the syntactic approach itself. This point is so simple, fundamental, and widely applicable, that it deserves a name; let's call it the Reductionist Cruncher. Just as the syntactic objects on paper can be described in molecular terms, for example as structures of carbon molecules, so the syntactic objects in our heads can be described in terms of the viewpoint of chemistry and physics. But a physico-chemical account of the syntactic objects in our head will be more general than the syntactic account in just the same way that the syntactic account is more general than the content account. There are possible beings, such as Mrs. T, who are similar to us syntactically but not in intentional contents. Similarly, there are possible beings who are similar to us in physico-chemical respects, but not syntactically. For example, creatures could be like us in physico-chemical respects without having physico-chemical parts that function as syntactic objects--just as Mrs. T's syntactic objects don't function so as to confer content upon them. If neural network models of the sort that anti-language of thought theorists favor could be bio-engineered, they would fit this description. The bio-engineered models would be like us and like Mrs. T in physico-chemical respects, but unlike us and unlike Mrs. T in syntactic respects. Further, the physico-chemical account will be more fine-grained than the syntactic account, just as the syntactic account is more fine-grained than the content account. Syntactic generalizations will fail under some physico-chemically specifiable circumstances, just as content generalizations fail under some syntactically specifiable circumstances. I mentioned that content generalizations might be compromised if the syntactic realizations include too many syntactic negations. The present point is that syntactic generalizations might fail when syntactic objects interact on the basis of certain physico-chemical properties. To take a slightly silly example, if a token of s and a token of s-- t are both positively charged so that they repel each other, that could prevent logic processors from putting them together to yield a token of t. In sum, if we could refute the content approach by showing that the the syntactic approach is more general and fine grained than the content approach, then we could also refute the syntactic approach by exhibiting the same deficiency in it relative to a still deeper theory. The Reductionist Cruncher applies even within physics itself. For example, anyone who rejects the explanations of thermodynamics in favor of the explanations of statistical mechanics will be frustrated by the fact that the explanations of statistical mechanics can themselves be "undermined" in just the same way by quantum mechanics. The same points can be made in terms of the explanation of how a computer works. Compare two explanations of the behavior of the computer on my desk, one in terms of the programming language, and the other in terms of what is happening in the computer's circuits. The latter level is certainly more general in that it applies not only to programmed computers, but also to non-programmable computers that are electronically similar to mine, for example, certain calculators. Thus the greater generality of the circuit level is like the greater generality of the syntactic perspective. Further, the circuit level is more fine grained in that it allows us to predict and explain computer failures that have nothing to do with program glitches. Circuits will fail under certain circumstances (for example, overload, excessive heat or humidity) that are not characterizable in the vocabulary of the program level. Thus the greater predictive and explanatory power of the circuit level is like the greater power of the syntactic level to distinguish cases of the same content represented in different syntactic forms that make a difference in processing. However, the computer analogy reveals a flaw in the argument that the "upper" level (the program level in this example) explanations are defective and should be scrapped. The fact that a "lower" level like the circuit level is superior in some respects does not show that "higher" levels such as the program levels are not themselves superior in other respects. Thus the upper levels are not shown to be dispensible. The program level has its own type of greater generality, namely it applies to computers that use the same programming language, but are built in different ways, even computers that don't have circuits at all (but say work via gears and pulleys). Indeed, there are many predictions and explanations that are simple at the program level, but would be absurdly complicated at the circuit level. Further (and here is the Reductionist Cruncher again), if the program level could be shown to be defective by the circuit level, then the circuit level could itself be shown to be defective by a deeper theory, for example, the quantum field theory of circuits. The point here is not that the program level is a convenient fiction. On the contrary, the program level is just as real and explanatory as the circuit level. Perhaps it will be useful to see the matter in terms of an example from Putnam (1975). Consider a rigid round peg 1 inch in diameter and a square hole in a rigid board with a 1 inch diagonal. The peg won't fit through the hole for reasons that are easy to understand via a little geometry. (The side of the hole is 1 divided by the square root of 2, which is a number substantially less than 1.) Now if we went to the level of description of this apparatus in terms of the molecular structure that makes up a specific solid board, we could explain the rigidity of the materials, and we would have a more fine-grained understanding, including the ability to predict the incredible case where the alignment and motion of the molecules is such as to allow the peg to actually go through the board. But the "upper" level account in terms of rigidity and geometry nonetheless provides correct explanations and predictions, and applies more generally to any rigid peg and board, even one with quite a different sort of molecular constitution, say one made of glass--a supercooled liquid--rather than a solid. It is tempting to say that the account in terms of rigidity and geometry is only an approximation, the molecular account being the really correct one. (See Smolensky, 1988, for a dramatic case of yielding to this sort of temptation.) But the cure for this temptation is the Reductionist Cruncher: the reductionist will also have to say that an elementary particle account shows the molecular account to be only an approximation. And the elementary particle account itself will be undermined by a still deeper theory. The point of a scientific account is to cut nature at its joints, and nature has real joints at many different levels, each of which requires its own kind of idealization. Further, what are counted as elementary particles today may be found to be composed of still more elementary particles tomorrow, and so on, ad infinitum. Indeed, contemporary physics allows this possiblity of an infinite series of particles within particles. (See Dehmelt, 1989.) If such an infinite series obtains, the reductionist would be committed to saying that there are no genuine explanations because for any explanation at any given level, there is always a deeper explanation that is more general and more fine-grained that undermines it. But the existence of genuine explanations surely does not depend on this recondite issue in particle physics! I have been talking as if there is just one content level, but actually there are many. Marr distinguished among three different levels: the computational level, the level of representation and algorithm, and the level of implementation. At the computational or formal level, the multiplier discussed earlier is to be understood as a function from pairs of numbers to their products, for example, from {7,9} to 63. The most abstract characterization at the level of representation and algorithm is simply the algorithm of the multiplier, namely: multiply n by m by adding m to zero n times. A less abstract characterization at this middle level is the program described earlier, a sequence of operations including subtracting 1 from the register that initially represents n until it is reduced to zero, adding m to the answer register each time. (See Figure 2.) Each of these levels is a content level rather than a syntactic level. There are many types of multipliers whose behavior can be explained (albeit at a somewhat superficial level) simply by reference to the fact that they are multipliers. The algorithm mentioned gives a deeper explanation, and the program--one of many programs that can realize that algorithm--gives still a deeper explanation. However, when we break the multiplier down into parts such as the adder of Figures 3a and 3b, we explain its internal operation in terms of gates that operate on syntax, that is in terms of operations on numerals. Now it is crucially important to realize that the mere possibility of a description of a system in a certain vocabulary does not by itself demonstrate the existence of a genuine explanatory level. We are concerned here with cutting nature at its joints, and talking as if there is a joint does not make it so. The fact that it is good methodology to look first for the function, then for the algorithm, then for the implementation, does not by itself show that these inquiries are inquiries at different levels, as opposed to different ways of approaching the same level. The crucial issue is whether the different vocabularies correspond to genuinely distinct laws and explanations, and in any given case, this question will only be answerable empirically. However, we already have good empirical evidence for the reality of the content levels just mentioned--as well as the syntactic level. The evidence is to be found in this very book, where we see genuine and distinct explanations at the level of function, algorithm and syntax. A further point about explanatory levels is that it is legitimate to use different and even incompatible idealizations at different levels. See Putnam (1975).) It has been argued that since the brain is analog, the digital computer must be incorrect as a model of the mind. But even digital computers are analog at one level of description. For example, gates of the sort described earlier in which 4 volts realizes `1' and 7 volts realizes `0' are understood from the digital perspective as always representing either `0' or `1'. But an examination at the electronic level shows that values intermediate between 4 and 7 volts appear momentarily when a register switches between them. We abstract from these intermediate values for the purposes of one level of description, but not another. 4.Searle's Chinese Room Argument As we have seen, the idea that a certain type of symbol processing can be what makes something an intentional system is fundamental to the computer model of the mind. Let us now turn to a flamboyant frontal attack on this idea by John Searle (1980, 1990b, Churchland and Churchland, 1990; the basic idea of this argument stems from Block, 1978). Searle's strategy is one of avoiding quibbles about specific programs by imagining that cognitive science of the distant future can come up with the program of an actual person who speaks and understands Chinese, and that this program can be implemented in a machine. Unlike many critics of the computer model, Searle is willing to grant that perhaps this can be done so as to focus on his claim that even if this can be done, the machine will not have intentional states. The argument is based on a thought experiment. Imagine yourself given a job in which you work in a room (the Chinese room). You understand only English. Slips of paper with Chinese writing on them are put under the input door, and your job is to write sensible Chinese replies on other slips, and push them out under the output door. How do you do it? You act as the CPU (central processing unit) of a computer, following the computer program mentioned above that describes the symbol processing in an actual Chinese speaker's head. The program is printed in English in a library in the room. This is how you follow the program. Suppose the latest input has certain unintelligible (to you) Chinese squiggles on it. There is a blackboard on a wall of the room with a "state" number written on it; it says `17'. (The CPU of a computer is a device with a finite number of states whose activity is determined solely by its current state and input, and since you are acting as the CPU, your output will be determined by your intput and your "state". The `17' is on the blackboard to tell you what your "state" is.) You take book 17 out of the library, and look up these particular squiggles in it. Book 17 tells you to look at what is written on your scratch pad (the computer's internal memory), and given both the input squiggles and the scratch pad marks, you are directed to change what is on the scratch pad in a certain way, write certain other squiggles on your output pad, push the paper under the output door, and finally, change the number on the state board to `193'. As a result of this activity, speakers of Chinese find that the pieces of paper you slip under the output door are sensible replies to the inputs.. But you know nothing of what is being said in Chinese; you are just following instructions (in English) to look in certain books and write certain marks. According to Searle, since you don't understand any Chinese, the system of which you are the CPU is a mere Chinese simulator, not a real Chinese understander. Of course, Searle (rightly) rejects the Turing Test for understanding Chinese. His argument, then is that since the program of a real Chinese understander is not sufficient for understanding Chinese, no symbol-manipulation theory of Chinese understanding (or any other intentional state) is correct about what makes something a Chinese understander. Thus the conclusion of Searle's argument is that the fundamental idea of thought as symbol processing is wrong even if it allows us to build a machine that can duplicate the symbol processing of a person and thereby duplicate a person's behavior. The best criticisms of the Chinese room argument have focused on what Searle--anticipating the challenge--calls the systems reply. (See the responses following Searle (1980), and the comment on Searle in Hofstadter and Dennett (1981).) The systems reply has a positive and a negative component. The negative component is that we cannot reason from "Bill has never sold uranium to North Korea" to "Bill's company has never sold uranium to North Korea". Similarly, we cannot reason from "Bill does not understand Chinese" to "The system of which Bill is a part does not understand Chinese. (See Copeland, 1993b.) There is a gap in Searle's argument. The positive component goes further, saying that the whole system--man + program + board + paper + input and output doors--does understand Chinese, even though the man who is acting as the CPU does not. If you open up your own computer, looking for the CPU, you will find that it is just one of the many chips and other components on the main circuit-board. The systems reply reminds us that the CPUs of the thinking computers we hope to have someday will not themselves think--rather, they will be parts of thinking systems. Searle's clever reply is to imagine the paraphernalia of the "system" internalized as follows. First, instead of having you consult a library, we are to imagine you memorizing the whole library. Second, instead of writing notes on scratch pads, you are to memorize what you would have written on the pads, and you are to memorize what the state blackboard would say. Finally, instead of looking at notes put under one door and passing notes under another door, you just use your own body to listen to Chinese utterances and produce replies. (This version of the Chinese room has the additional advantage of generalizability so as to involve the complete behavior of a Chinese-speaking system instead of just a Chinese note exchanger.) But as Searle would emphasize, when you seem to Chinese speakers to be conducting a learned discourse with them in Chinese, all you are aware of doing is thinking about what noises the program tells you to make next, given the noises you hear and what you've written on your mental scratch pad. I argued above that the CPU is just one of many components. If the whole system understands Chinese, that should not lead us to expect the CPU to understand Chinese. The effect of Searle's internalization move--the "new" Chinese Room--is to attempt to destroy the analogy between looking inside the computer and looking inside the Chinese Room. If one looks inside the computer, one sees many chips in addition to the CPU. But if one looks inside the "new" Chinese Room, all one sees is you, since you have memorized the library and internalized the functions of the scratchpad and the blackboard. But the point to keep in mind is that although the non-CPU components are no longer easy to see, they are not gone. Rather, they are internalized. If the program requires the contents of one register to be placed in another register, and if you would have done this in the original Chinese Room by copying from one piece of scratch paper to another, in the new Chinese Room you must copy from one of your mental analogs of a piece of scratch paper to another. You are implementing the system by doing what the CPU would do and you are simultaneously simulating the non-CPU components. So if the positive side of the systems reply is correct, the total system that you are implementing does understand Chinese. "But how can it be", Searle would object, "that you implement a system that understands Chinese even though you don't understand Chinese?" The systems reply rejoinder is that you implement a Chinese understanding system without yourself understanding Chinese or necessarily even being aware of what you are doing under that description. The systems reply sees the Chinese Room (new and old) as an English system implementing a Chinese system. What you are aware of are the thoughts of the English system, for example your following instructions and consulting your internal library. But in virtue of doing this Herculean task, you are also implementing a real intelligent Chinese-speaking system, and so your body houses two genuinely distinct intelligent systems. The Chinese system also thinks, but though you implement this thought, you are not aware of it. The systems reply can be backed up with an addition to the thought experiment that highlights the division of labor. Imagine that you take on the Chinese simulating as a 9-5 job. You come in Monday morning after a weekend of relaxation, and you are paid to follow the program until 5 PM. When you are working, you concentrate hard at working, and so instead of trying to figure out the meaning of what is said to you, you focus your energies on working out what the program tells you to do in response to each input. As a result, during working hours, you respond to everything just as the program dictates, except for occasional glances at your watch. (The glances at your watch fall under the same category as the noises and heat given off by computers: aspects of their behavior that is not part of the machine description but are due rather to features of the implementation.) If someone speaks to you in English, you say what the program (which, you recall, describes a real Chinese speaker) dictates. So if during working hours someone speaks to you in English, you respond with a request in Chinese to speak Chinese, or even an inexpertly pronounced "No speak English," that was once memorized by the Chinese speaker being simulated, and which you the English speaking system may even fail to recognize as English. Then, come 5 PM, you stop working, and react to Chinese talk the way any monolingual English speaker would. Why is it that the English system implements the Chinese system rather than, say, the other way around? Because you (the English system whom I am now addressing) are following the instructions of a program in English to make Chinese noises and not the other way around. If you decide to quit your job to become a magician, the Chinese system disappears. However, if the Chinese system decides to become a magician, he will make plans that he would express in Chinese, but then when 5 P.M. rolls around, you quit for the day, and the Chinese system's plans are on the shelf until you come back to work. And of course you have no commitment to doing whatever the program dictates. If the program dictates that you make a series of movements that leads you to a flight to China, you can drop out of the simulating mode, saying "I quit!" The Chinese speaker's existence and the fulfillment of his plans depends on your work schedule and your plans, not the other way around. Thus, you and the Chinese system cohabit one body. In effect, Searle uses the fact that you are not aware of the Chinese system's thoughts as an argument that it has no thoughts. But this is an invalid argument. Real cases of multiple personalities are often cases in which one personality is unaware of the others. It is instructive to compare Searle's thought experiment with the string-searching Aunt Bubbles machine described at the outset of this paper. This machine was used against a behaviorist proposal of a behavioral concept of intelligence. But the symbol manipulation view of the mind is not a proposal about our everyday concept. To the extent that we think of the English system as implementing a Chinese system, that will be because we find the symbol-manipulation theory of the mind plausible as an empirical theory. There is one aspect of Searle's case with which I am sympathetic. I have my doubts as to whether there is anything it is like to be the Chinese system, that is, whether the Chinese system is a phenomenally conscious system. My doubts arise from the idea that perhaps consciousness is more a matter of implementation of symbol processing than of symbol processing itself. Though surprisingly Searle does not mention this idea in connection with the Chinese Room, it can be seen as the argumentative heart of his position. Searle has argued independently of the Chinese Room (Searle, 1992, Ch 7) that intentionality requires consciousness. (See the replies to Searle in Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13, 1990.) But this doctrine, if correct, can shore up the Chinese Room argument. For if the Chinese system is not conscious, then, according to Searle's doctrine, it is not an intentional system either. Even if I am right about the failure of Searle's argument, it does succeed in sharpening our understanding of the nature of intentionality and its relation to computation and representation. 7 Footnotes 1. The Aunt Bubbles machine refutes something stronger than behaviorism, namely the claim that the mental "supervenes" on the behavioral; that is, that there can be no mental difference without a behavioral difference. (Of course, the behavioral dispositions are finite--see the next paragraph in the text.) I am indebted to Stephen White for pointing out to me that the doctrine of the supervenience of the mental on the behavioral is widespread among thinkers who reject behaviorism, such as Donald Davidson. The Aunt Bubbles machine is described and defended in detail in Block (1978, 1981a), and was independently discovered by White (1982). 2. The rightmost digit in binary (as in familiar decimal) is the 1s place. The second digit from the right is the 2s place (corresponding to the 10s place in decimal). Next is the 4s place (that is, 2 squared), just as the corresponding place in decimal is the 10 squared place. 3. The idea described here was first articulated to my knowledge in Fodor (1975, 1980); see also Dennett (1981) to which the terms `semantic engine' and `syntactic engine' are due, and Newell (1980). More on this topic can be found in Dennett (1987) by looking up `syntactic engine' and `semantic engine' in the index. 4. In one respect, the meanings of mental symbols cannot be semantically more basic than meanings of external symbols. The name `Aristotle' has the reference it has because of its causal connection (via generations of speakers) to a man who was called by a name that was an ancestor of our external term `Aristotle'. So the term in the language of thought that corresponds to `Aristotle' will certainly derive its reference from and thus will be semantically less basic than the public language word. 5. Note that the type of success is important to whether connectionism is really a rival to the language of thought point of view. Connectionist networks have been successful in various pattern recognition tasks, for example discriminating mines from rocks. Of course, even if these networks could be made to do pattern recognition tasks much better than we can, that wouldn't suggest that these networks can provide models of higher cognition. Computers that are programmed to do arithmetic in the classical symbol-crunching mode can do arithmetic much better than we can, but no one would conclude that therefor these computers provide models of higher cognition. 6. This table could be used to describe a machine that does have a memory with explicit representation. I say "naturally described" to indicate that I am thinking of a machine which does not have such a memory, a machine for which the table in Figure 7 is an apt and natural description. 7. I am indebted to Ken Aizawa, George Boolos, Susan Carey, Willem DeVries, Jerry Fodor and Steven White for comments on an earlier draft. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (DIR8812559) Bibliography Beakeley, B. and Ludlow, P. eds. (1992). 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The Meanings of Darwinism: Then and Now?Charles Darwin grew up in Shrewsbury, Shropshire and attended Shrewsbury School for seven years. The school held a Millennium Conference on 'Darwinism and Ethics for the Next Millennium' on 16 October 1999. Papers were given by Mary Midgley, Matt Ridley, Colin Tudge and Robert M. Young.
The Meanings of Darwinism: Then and Now? | Home - Robert M. Young | What's New | Search | Feedback | Guestbook | Contact Us | The Writings of Professor Robert M. Young 'The Meanings of Darwinism: Then and Now?' Charles Darwin grew up in Shrewsbury, Shropshire and attended Shrewsbury School for seven years. The school held a Millennium Conference on 'Darwinism and Ethics for the Next Millennium' on 16 October 1999. Papers were given by Mary Midgley, Matt Ridley, Colin Tudge and me. There was a lively, civil and interesting discussion among the speakers and from the floor. In my paper I move back and forth between issues which arose around Darwinism in the nineteenth century and the claims made for a wider philosophy in his name in the present, in particular, the relationship between cultural explanations and those of Darwinian Psychology. Download View Online The Human Nature Review Ian Pitchford and Robert M. Young - Last updated: 28 December, 1999 09:00 AM | Human Nature | Books and Reviews | The Human Nature Daily Review | Search |
Prediction and Accommodation in Evolutionary PsychologyKetelaar and Ellis have provided a remarkably clear and succinct statement of Lakatosian philosophy of science and have also argued compellingly that evolutionary theory fills the Lakatosian criteria of a progressivity.
Ketelaar and Ellis have provided a remarkably clear and succinct statement of Lakatosian philosophy of science and have also argued compellingly that evolutionary theory fills the Lakatosian criteria of a progressivity Prediction and Accommodation in Evolutionary Psychology Malcolm Forster Department of Philosophy University of Wisconsin Madison Lawrence Shapiro Department of Philosophy University of Wisconsin Madison Note: If you want to print this article, then there is a PDF version , which will print better. Ketelaar and Ellis have provided a remarkably clear and succinct statement of Lakatosian philosophy of science and have also argued compellingly that the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution fills the Lakatosian criteria of progressivity. We find ourselves in agreement with much of what Ketelaar and Ellis say about Lakatosian philosophy of science, but have some questions about (1) the place of evolutionary psychology in a Lakatosian framework, and (2) the extent to which evolutionary psychology truly predicts new findings. Lakatos, as Ketelaar and Ellis observe, conceives of research programs as having two levels: a hard core consisting of fundamental meta-theoretical assumptions and a protective belt containing auxiliary assumptions. Together, the hard core and the protective belt produce hypotheses and predictions that, ultimately, can confirm or disconfirm the assumptions in the hard core. Typically, however, failed predictions do not call into question the meta-theoretical assumptions of the hard core. This is so, for hypotheses and predictions derive from the hard core and the auxiliary assumptions of the protective belt. Consequently, given recalcitrant data, one can always place the blame on the assumptions in the protective belt, leaving untarnished the meta-theoretical assumptions of the hard core. It is only when the protective belt begins to function simply as a device for explaining away anomalies and does little by way of generating new predictions that the time comes to suspect the assumptions of the hard core. Lakatos' main concern is with the evaluation of the assumptions in the hard core. Toward this end, Lakatos distinguishes between progressive and degenerative research programs. A progressive research program one that absorbs anomalies and generates new predictions confirms the assumptions of the hard core. In contrast, when a research program is degenerative when it dedicates its auxiliary assumptions to explaining away anomalies that otherwise would endanger the meta-theoretical assumptions and fails to yield new predictions the assumptions of the hard core become disconfirmed. So far, we have said nothing that disagrees with Ketelaar and Ellis' description of Lakatos. But, we now come to our first question. How does Lakatos' understanding of the structure of science apply to evolutionary psychology? Ketelaar and Ellis often claim that it is evolutionary theory that is a progressive research program. Few would question this. In Lakatosian terms, the hard core of evolutionary theory would presumably include assumptions like the following: organisms evolve by natural selection, heritable traits are transmitted from parent to offspring via genes, etc. Evolutionary psychology is not part of the hard core of this research program. Rather, it lies in the protective belt. As Ketelaar and Ellis seem to recognize, evolutionary psychology is an application of the principles in the hard core of the Neo-Darwinian research program to questions about psychological processes. Yet, if this is correct, Ketelaar and Ellis' use of Lakatos to assuage doubts about the legitimacy of evolutionary psychology is confused. If, as we suggested above, evolutionary psychology does not belong in the hard core of the Darwinian research program, then Lakatos' distinction between progressive and degenerative research programs does not help in the evaluation of evolutionary psychology. Whether a research program is progressive or degenerative matters to the confirmation of the assumptions in the hard core, but, we are assuming, evolutionary psychology is not part of the hard core of the Neo-Darwinian research program. In short, Ketelaar and Ellis are unclear about whether their interest in Lakatos is for the purpose of lending credence to the Neo-Darwinian research program or to evolutionary psychology. If the former, one wonders why they feel the need. If the latter, they have misapplied Lakatosian philosophy of science. We turn now to a second complementary issue. If evolutionary psychology is not to be evaluated as a part of a scientific hard core, then how should it be evaluated? Even more fundamentally: What is evolutionary psychology? In considering these questions, it pays to shift one's focus from Lakatosian philosophy of science to Kuhnian philosophy of science. Kuhn offers us the concept of normal science. Normal science is not concerned with testing the assumptions of the hard core. Rather, normal science proceeds on the assumption that the hard core is well-confirmed and consists in the investigation of puzzles and questions that have aroused scientists' curiosity. It is entirely rare for a scientist to engage in research that tests the assumptions of the hard core. Far more likely, the scientist will seek answers to puzzles that have little bearing on meta-theoretical assumptions: Why do oil tankers sink? What makes a tornado? What effect will genetically altered corn have on monarch butterfly populations? While Kuhns normative view of science is unacceptable ("As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community" (1970, p.94)), philosophers of science need to recognize that normal science is a knowledge-generating process in its own right. The merits of normal science rest not in its ability to confirm the hard core, but in its facility to solve puzzles. The remaining question is: How should puzzle solutions be evaluated? An analogy will help to illustrate the standard that evolutionary psychology must meet. Newtonian physics left unexplained a small amount of rotation of the ellipse of Mercury's orbit, referred to as the precession of the perihelion. Naturally, a desperate Newtonian could have revised various parameters in his theory, or introduced new ones, in an effort to account for the unexpected precession. However, to do so would have been ad hoc it would have been an exercise in accommodation rather than explanation. It is precisely because Einstein's theories of special and general relativity predict just such a motion in Mercury's orbit given the same values for the various parameters that the Newtonians recognized that Einstein's explanation is superior. Einstein could account for mercury's precession without having to modify well-confirmed values of parameters or to introduce new parameters whose sole purpose would have been to accommodate the effect. The difference between how Einstein did explain the precession in Mercury's orbit and how a Newtonian might have explained it corresponds with Lakatos' distinction between a progressive problemshift and a degenerative one. Progressive problemshifts are those that lead to genuine predictions; degenerative ones are those that lead to false predictions or offer mere accommodation. Thus, the basic ingredients for the evaluation of normal science are present in Lakatoss methodology, even if they are not used for that purpose. But, is evolutionary psychology progressive or degenerative? First of all, it would be wrong to suppose that this is a simple either or affair. Different applications of evolutionary psychology may be evaluated independently of one another. We also believe that it is too soon to judge the merit of some of these applications. In this regard, our discussion of the dispute between Newtonians and Einstein suggests some points that evolutionary psychologists do well to heed. First, in favor of Einsteinian normal science is the fact that it offers predictions that Newtonian physics does not. However, it is no easy matter to limn the predictive power of a theory. If we are to accept the explanations of evolutionary psychology as superior alternatives to non-evolutionary psychology, we must be clear about what sorts of phenomena non-evolutionary psychology is capable of predicting and, on the other hand, what sorts of phenomena non-evolutionary psychology cannot predict. Similarly, like any successful normal science, the predictions of evolutionary psychology must go beyond mere accommodation. We do not wish to claim that any and all accommodation is degenerative. Indeed, accommodation plays a crucial role in theory development the constants in a theory are, after all, initially the product of accommodating theory to data. Nonetheless, a progressive research program is one that goes beyond accommodation that uses past accommodation to predict new and perhaps otherwise unexpected phenomena. Can evolutionary psychology do this? Perhaps, but it seems to us that the burden falls on evolutionary psychologists to show that it can. So, for instance, in their discussion of male parental investment Ketelaar and Ellis say that "selection should concomitantly favor the evolution of male strategies designed to reduce the chance of diverting parental effort toward unrelated young" (p. 17). They then cite Daly et al.'s claim that these strategies include "the use or threat of violence to achieve sexual exclusivity and control" (Daly et al. 1982, p. 11). But, is the use of violence to achieve sexual exclusivity a prediction of evolutionary psychology? It is difficult to see why. Surely there are many ways that a male parent might insure that the offspring in which he invests are his own. He might, as Daly et al. suggest, use violence to prevent his sexual partner from philandering. Alternatively, he might make his investments conditional on the fidelity of his partner, or he might sequester his partner for the duration of their courtship, or he might enlist the help of relatives to serve as a chaperon for his partner, etc. The problem is that the hypothesis Ketelaar and Ellis invite us to consider that selection should favor the evolution of male strategies that reduce the chance of investment in unrelated young does not by itself entail anything about the use of violence to achieve sexual exclusivity. It does predict that males who invest in young will take measures to insure that these young are relatives, but it doesn't predict how they will do so. To discover which strategies males actually adopt, one must collect data. One might, as Daly et al. surmise, find that investing males use violence to enforce fidelity. But, we wonder, is this surmise a prediction, or is it accommodation to what has already been observed? Until these questions are sorted out, and this is by no means a trivial task, the value of evolutionary psychology remains uncertain. Ketelaar, Timothy, and Ellis, Bruce J. (forthcoming): "Are Evolutionary Explanations Unfalsifiable?: Evolutionary Psychology and the Lakatosian Philosophy of Science." Evolutionary Psychology. Kuhn, Thomas (1970): The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Second Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Evolution, Biology and Psychology from a Marxist Point of ViewThis article is largely historical, but the issues remain timely.
'Evolution, Biology and Psychology from a Marxist Point of View' 50k | Home - Human Nature Review | What's new | Search | Feedback | Amazon Products DISCOUNT Super Search Search Type Keyword Search Actor Search Director Search Band Artist Search Author Search ISBN Search UPC Search (CDs Only) Manufacturer Search Term Product Type Books ... Magazines All Movies ... DVD Only ... VHS Only CD Music Electronics ... Computers ... ... Software Toys Games ... Video Games Outdoor Living Kitchen Housewares Camera Photo Tools Hardware Baby The Writings of Professor Robert M. Young 'Evolution, Biology and Psychology from a Marxist Point of View' 50k I was asked to contribute this chapter to a volume to be entitle Psychology and Marxism: Coexistence and Contradiction, edited by Ian Parker and Russell Spears, to be published by Pluto Press. It transpired that they could not get an American co-publisher if 'Marxism' was in the title, so the final title was a rather insipid one: Psychology and Society: Radical Theory and Practice (1996, pp. 35-49). In preparing the essay I found myself re-reading writings (some of them by me) which re-evoked the convictions which drew so many of us to libertarian marxism. Now that there is no place, party or subculture which identifies itself with any version of marxism to which we could adhere, we are believers without a locus and largely without practices which feel congruent with these beliefs. The article is largely historical, but the issues remain timely. Download View Online The Human Nature Review Ian Pitchford and Robert M. Young - Last updated: 22 July, 1999 09:41 AM | Human Nature | Books and Reviews | The Human Nature Daily Review | Search |
Scholarship and the History of the Behavioural SciencesA paper that first appeared in History of Science 2: 1-51, 1966.
Scholarship and the History of the Behavioural Sciences | Home - Robert M. Young | What's New | Search | Feedback | Guestbook | Contact Us | The Writings of Professor Robert M. Young 'Scholarship and the History of the Behavioural Sciences' 182k I wrote this in my first year or two as a University Assistant Lecturer in Cambridge. It has all the hallmarks of a Young Turk's effort to sweep away all previous approaches to make way for the One True Highest Standard. Most writing in the history of psychology had until then been conceived within a positivist historiography, where in true science was more or less badly anticipated by people who were not proper experimentalists. I had written my own doctoral dissertation on this history of brain studies from within the approach of the history of ideas, inspired by A. O. Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being, and set out to re-found the history of the human sciences in those terms. In spite of its arrogance, the article had a considerable influence. My title was meant to contrast 'scholarship' with much of what was written under the banner of 'the history of the behavioural sciences', mostly in America. I even recall seeing an essay a decade later which began, 'It is ten years since Robert Young...' I was hardest on Robert I. Watson, a nice man and the founder of the Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences, whose synoptic history of psychology exemplified much of what I was criticising. A truly modest man, he took the criticisms to heart and re-wrote his book with a fulsome acknowledgement to my criticisms. I suppose this essay was my first long, ruminative reflection on a discipline and its wider context of ideas, and I still feel wedded to the scholarly values advocated in it. It first appeared in History of Science 2: 1-51, 1966. Download View Online The Human Nature Review Ian Pitchford and Robert M. Young - Last updated: 08 March, 2002 10:01 AM | Human Nature | Books and Reviews | The Human Nature Daily Review | Search |
It's only natural - Red Pepper archiveThe bioglogical differences between men and women are no threat to feminism, says Helena Cronin.
Red Pepper archive It's only natural The bioglogical differences between men and women are no threat to feminism, says Helena Cronin. I recently heard a member of a girls' street gang boasting about their macho initiation ceremony. Recruits have to choose between being beaten up or having sex with a male gang member. Imagine making that same offer to male initiates. Sex not as a reward but as a penalty? Laughable. Meanwhile, a study of American college students showed a parallel result. Asked by a stranger for a date, 50 per cent of both women and men agreed. But asked 'Have sex with me tonight?', not one woman agreed, whereas men shot to 75 per cent. Before you reach for your 'social construction of gender' theory don't. Such disparate female-male values reflect a difference in our evolved psychologies, honed by natural selection for over two million years. Evolution made mens' and women's minds as unalike as it made our bodies. And it's time feminists and leftists started taking the implications seriously. Consider the largest, most wide-ranging survey ever made of male-female psychological differences, covering 37 cultures on six continents, totalling over 10,000 people urban and rural, old and young, educated and illiterate. Universally, it was found, women desire older husbands; nowhere do men desire older wives. Universally, men value female virginity more than women value men's. Universally, male sexual jealousy focuses more on sexual than emotional infidelity, female jealousy vice versa. There are cultural differences virginity counts for a lot in Iran but for very little in Sweden. But everywhere there was a male-female difference and always in the same direction. These were precisely the differences that Darwinian theory predicted. Here are human universals, an underlying human psychology, showing up even across huge cultural, economic, social and political differences. Why are there sex differences? Give a man 50 wives and he could have 50 times more children. But a woman with 50 husbands? Generation after generation, down evolutionary time, natural selection has favoured men but not women who have out-competed their rivals for access to mates. We are all the descendants of such competitive males and of less competitive females. In cartoons, that competition amounts to cave-men biffing their rivals and dragging off the girl by her hair. But natural selection has favoured more subtle means in particular, males showing females that they've got the resources to bring up our species' highly dependent offspring. Nowadays, a Rolex or designer trainers can settle that. But resource accumulation became possible only when agriculture was invented, about 10,000 years ago. For 99 per cent of our evolutionary history we have been gatherer-hunters. In that environment, in which we evolved and to which our psychology is fine-tuned to this day, social resources were what mattered. Men not socially skilled? Don't believe it. They are masters at status-seeking; face-saving; assessing reputation; detecting slights; retaliating against insults; and engaging in ethological 'display' escalated showing-off. As part of this package, they are more persistent than females, more disposed to take risks and more promiscuous. Construe competition that way and you can see how a psychology built for divergent mating strategies might ramify throughout our evolved minds, pervading male and female psychologies. The divergence doesn't stop at how fast you'll jump into bed. It influences who commits murder, who causes road accidents and who is a computer nerd. All this is well-established science, painstakingly modelled and tested. And yet feminist orthodoxy persists in denying any evolutionary basis to sex differences (obvious bits apart). The word 'biology' induces acute panic attacks, fears of 'genetic determinism', 'reductionism', 'sexism' and the like. Well, let me through; I'm a Darwinian. Perhaps I can help. Genetic determinism? Genes can do their work single-mindedly, and we're thankful for it every time a perfectly-formed baby is born. But genes can also promote flexibility and variety. Innate rules intricate, highly specific and universal enable us to speak a human language. But a vast diversity of languages is generated from those same rules in different environments. That's how genes work for human behaviour: universal rules our psychology; flexible outcomes our behaviour. The rules laid down in our brains are designed to help us respond appropriately to whatever environment we find ourselves in. Reductionism? Does this mean 'reducing' to genes? We've just seen that evolutionary explanations are about evolved psychologies in particular environments. Or does it mean 'reducing' human behaviour to the laws of science? Is this an objection to the awe-inspiring quest to plumb the mysteries of our universal human nature? Sexism? This assumes that differences are necessarily invidious and that women will necessarily emerge as 'inferior'. Feminists should know better. Science simply tells it like it is; it doesn't dictate goals. But how can we promote a fairer world from social and legal policy to personal relationships unless we understand differences, unless we let truth, not ignorance, be our guide? Helena Cronin is the author of The Ant and the Peacock (Cambridge University Press, 13.95). She runs a programme called Darwin@LSE. Tel 0171 955 6236 for more information. Top Back to cultural archive
Humans-Who Are We? - Official Web SiteHumans are brimming with unique traits that do not fit the animal mold - according to the Jehovah's Witnesses.
Humans-Who Are We? - Jehovah's Witnesses Official Web Site HumansJust Higher Animals? HumansWho Are We? In this series: Humans Who Are We? In the Image of God or Beast? Looking Up, Not Down, for Answers Related topics: Will Science Create a Perfect Society? Life A Product of Design It seems that humans have an identity problem. Evolutionist Richard Leakey observes: "For centuries philosophers have dealt with aspects of humanness, of humanity. But, surprisingly, there is no agreed-upon definition of the quality of humanness." However, the Copenhagen Zoo boldly gave its opinion by way of an exhibit in its primate house. The 1997 Britannica Book of the Year explains: "A Danish couple moved into temporary living quarters at the zoo with the intention of reminding visitors of their close kinship to the apes." Reference works give credence to such an alleged close kinship of certain animals with humans. The World Book Encyclopedia, for example, says: "Human beings, along with apes, lemurs, monkeys, and tarsiers, make up the order of mammals called primates." Yet, the fact is, humans are brimming with unique traits that do not fit the animal mold. Among these are love, conscience, morality, spirituality, justice, mercy, humor, creativity, awareness of time, self-awareness, aesthetic appreciation, concern for the future, the ability to accumulate knowledge over generations, and the hope that death is not the ultimate end of our existence. In an attempt to reconcile these traits with the animal mold, some point to evolutionary psychology, which is an amalgam of evolution, psychology, and social science. Has evolutionary psychology shed light on the puzzle of human nature? What Is the Purpose of Life? "The premise of evolutionary psychology is simple," says evolutionist Robert Wright. "The human mind, like any other organ, was designed for the purpose of transmitting genes to the next generation; the feelings and thoughts it creates are best understood in these terms." In other words, our whole purpose in life, as dictated by our genes and reflected in the workings of our mind, is to breed. Indeed, "much of human nature," according to evolutionary psychology, "boils down to ruthless genetic self-interest." The book The Moral Animal says: "Natural selection 'wants' men to have sex with an endless series of women." According to this evolutionary concept, under certain circumstances immorality for women is also seen as natural. Even parental love is seen as a gene-inspired ploy to ensure the survival of offspring. Thus, one view emphasizes the importance of genetic legacy in making sure that the human family is perpetuated. Some self-help books now ride on the new wave of evolutionary psychology. One of them describes human nature as "not very different from chimpanzee nature, gorilla nature, or baboon nature." It also states: "When it comes to evolution, . . . it's reproduction that counts." On the other hand, the Bible teaches that God created humans for a purpose beyond simply breeding. We were made in God's "image," with the capacity to reflect his attributes, especially love, justice, wisdom, and power. Add the unique traits of humans that were mentioned earlier, and it becomes clear why the Bible sets humans above animals. The Bible, in fact, reveals that God created humans with not only the desire to live forever but also the ability to enjoy the fulfillment of that desire in a righteous new world of God's making.Genesis 1:27, 28; Psalm 37:9-11, 29; Ecclesiastes 3:11; John 3:16; Revelation 21:3, 4. What We Believe Makes a Difference Determining the correct view is far from academic, for what we believe about our origins can affect how we live. The historian H. G. Wells noted the conclusions that many reached after Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859. "A real de-moralization ensued. . . . There was a real loss of faith after 1859. . . . Prevalent peoples at the close of the nineteenth century believed that they prevailed by virtue of the Struggle for Existence, in which the strong and cunning get the better of the weak and confiding. . . . Man, they decided, is a social animal like the Indian hunting dog. . . . It seemed right to them that the big dogs of the human pack should bully and subdue." Clearly, it is important that we gain a correct view regarding who we really are. For, as one evolutionist asked, "if plain old-fashioned Darwinism . . . sapped the moral strength of Western civilization, what will happen when the new version [of evolutionary psychology] fully sinks in?" Since what we believe regarding our origins affects our fundamental views on life and on right and wrong, it is vital that we take a close look at this whole question. Historian H. G. Wells noted the conclusions that many reached after Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859: "A real de-moralization ensued. . . . There was a real loss of faith after 1859" Appeared in Awake!June 22, 1998 Home | Beliefs | Future | Medical | Topics | Contact Us | Publications | Languages | Search | Index Copyright 2002 Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania. All rights reserved.
Why we're all getting brighterDumbing down? Don't believe it. Scientists have proved we are smarter now than ever before, largely because we watch TV, surf the net, and spend hours chatting to friends.
Guardian Unlimited | Archive Search Go to: Guardian Unlimited home UK news World news Newsblog ---------------------- Archive search Arts Books EducationGuardian.co.uk Film Football Jobs MediaGuardian.co.uk Money The Observer Politics Science Shopping SocietyGuardian.co.uk Sport Talk Technology Travel Been there ---------------------- Audio Email services Special reports The Guardian The northerner The wrap ---------------------- Advertising guide Crossword Soulmates dating Headline service Syndication services Events offers Help contacts Feedback Information GNL press office Living our values Newsroom Notes Queries Reader Offers Style guide Travel offers TV listings Weather Web guides Working at GNL ---------------------- Guardian Weekly Money Observer Public Networkhome UKnews Worldlatest Books Money Film Society TheObserver Politics Education Shopping Work Football Jobs Media Search Why we're all getting brighter Anthony Browne Observer Sunday April 22, 2001 Dumbing down? Don't believe it. Scientists have proved we are smarter now than ever before, largely because we watch TV, surf the net, and spend hours chatting to friends. Analyses of IQ tests show that people are getting rapidly more intelligent, or at least getting higher scores. Average scores have risen by 27 points in the UK since 1942 and 24 points in the US since 1918, with comparable gains across the world. This so-called 'Flynn effect', first discovered in 1987, has until now baffled psychologists. However, a study in the Psychological Review of the American Psychological Association claims that a more stimulating environment and genetic inheritance interact in a virtuous circle to make people far smarter. The authors, Bill Dickens and James Flynn (who first discovered the effect), reckon the rise is partly caused by improved education. But more important is a stimulating environment, which makes people think more, prompting them to choose yet more stimulation. The smarter you are, the more likely you are to enjoy books, puzzles and challenging jobs. That in turn gets your brain working more and you choose even higher levels of stimulation in a virtuous circle of intelligence. 'Higher IQ leads one to better environments, causing still higher IQ,' said the report. Fewer people are doing repetitive manual work and the average person's job is far more complex. Even people in less skilled jobs use computers. Increased leisure time could also mean people are honing their intelligence by reading, playing games or solving puzzles, and TV and the internet bombard us with information. Machines such as cars, phones and video-recorders that make you use your brain, while conveniences such as washing machines and dishwashers take out the drudgery that pre-occupied earlier generations. Smaller families may also have helped, with fewer children having more parental time to cater to their natural curiosity. How smart are you? Answer true or false to these IQ test questions in under 90 seconds. 1. It is possible to use three colours to paint the sides of a cube in such a way that two sides of the same colour never touch. 2. A bagel-shaped house has three outside doors and three doors to an inner courtyard. It is possible to go through all doors once only and end up at the same place. 3. The following argument is valid: All humans are mortal. Socrates is human. Therefore Socrates is mortal. 4. Gina is faster than Jane, and Jo is slower than Gina. So Jo is faster than Jane. 5. Some ladies sit with their cats. There are 22 heads and 72 feet in total in the room. This means that there are 7 ladies and 15 cats. Scroll down for answers Answers to test: 1.T; 2.F; 3.T; 4.F; 5.F. Four correct is a good score. Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
MenarcheAny decrease in average menarcheal age during the past 20-30 years has been small (almost certainly less than six months), particularly when compared with the reduction of a year or more that occurred in many European countries between the late 19th and mid 20th centuries.
Age of menarche in contemporary British teenagers: survey of girls born between 1982 and 1986 -- Whincup et al. 322 (7294): 1095 -- BMJ Home Help Search Archive Feedback Table of Contents Author Keyword(s) Vol Page [Advanced] This article PDF extra: Figure, table and previous studies details Respond to this article Read responses to this article Alert me when this article is cited Alert me when responses are posted Alert me when a correction is posted View citation map Services Email this article to a friend Find similar articles in BMJ Find similar articles in PubMed Add article to my folders Download to citation manager Read articles citing this article Google Scholar Articles by Whincup, P H Articles by Cook, D G Articles citing this Article PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Whincup, P H Articles by Cook, D G Related content Other sexual medicine Reproductive medicine Related Articles BMJ 2001;322:1095-1096 (5May) Papers Age of menarche in contemporary British teenagers: survey of girls born between 1982and 1986 P HWhincup , professor of cardiovascular epidemiology a, J AGilg , research statistician a, KOdoki , clinical research fellow a, S J CTaylor , senior clinical lecturer b, D GCook , professor of epidemiology a. aDepartment of Public Health Sciences, St George's Hospital Medical School, London SW17 0RE, bDepartment of General Practice and Primary Care, Medical Sciences, Queen Mary and Westfield College, London E1 4NS Correspondence to: P H Whincup p.whincup{at}sghms.ac.uk The possibility that puberty is occurring earlier in Britain than previously has caused great interest. 1 Despite the importance of menarcheal age as an indicator of puberty, 2 there is little information on menarcheal age in contemporary teenagers to compare with data on girls born in the 1950s and 1960s. We report on the distribution of menarcheal age in a survey of British girls born between 1982and 1986. Participants, methods, and results Top Participants, methods, and... Comment References In 1998-9we studied the cardiovascular health of secondary school children aged 12-16in schools in 10British towns: five in southern England (Esher, Leatherhead, Chelmsford, Bath, Tunbridge Wells), three in north west England (Wigan, Burnley, Rochdale), and two in south Wales (Port Talbot, Rhondda). We approached those secondary schools corresponding to a stratified random sample of primary schools in our earlier study 3 ; 62of 65(95%) with female pupils participated. In each school we invited girls from the earlier study to participate, with a supplementary random sample of pupils from the same classes. 3 During screening the girls completed a confidential self administered questionnaire on date of birth, whether they had started their periods and, if so, their age (years and months) at the first period. Social class was based on parental occupation (using the Registrar General's 1990classification). Ethnicity was based on appearance and cross checked with surname and parental self assessment. We used SAS (version 6.12) for the statistical analysis. We determined the median age of menarche and confidence intervals using survival analysis with PROC LIFETEST. We included girls who had not yet had their first period (88participants); for girls providing only year of menarche (231), the month was imputed using the mean value for other girls of the same age in years. Probit transformation 2 of the percentage of affirmative responses at each age gave almost identical results. In all, 1166girls aged 12-16years (1068European, 79South Asian, 19other) reported their menarcheal age (response 66%). The median menarcheal age was 12years 11months (95% confidence interval 12years 10months to 13years 1month). The percentages of girls who reported having had their first period by their 10th, 11th, or 12th birthdays were 0.8,3.6and 21.7,respectively; 11.8% had their first period before leaving primary school. Median ages of menarche were similar in different regions (table) and did not differ by social class or ethnic group (see table on website). Non-responders closely resembled responders in age and geographical location. Comment Top Participants, methods, and... Comment References The median age of menarche in contemporary British teenagers is around 13years. In our study geographical, social, and ethnic variations were small, suggesting that non-response bias in menarcheal age was likely to be limited. Comparison with British girls born between 1950and 1965(table) suggests that the median menarcheal age reported here is close to or slightly below the earlier findings. Two points emerge clearly from the results. Firstly, any decrease in average menarcheal age during the past 20-30years has been small (almost certainly less than six months), particularly when compared with the reduction of a year or more that occurred in many European countries (including Britain) between the late 19th and mid 20th centuries. 2 4 Secondly, even though no appreciable recent decrease in menarcheal age has occurred, almost one girl in eight reaches menarche while still at primary school. This needs to be taken into account when providing sanitary facilities and health information for female pupils in primary school. View this table: [in this window] [in a new window] Age of menarche in contemporary British teenagers and those born between 1950and 1965 Acknowledgments We thank all the participants for their help. Contributors: PHW and DGC had the idea for the paper and designed the study with support from KO and SJCT. JAG carried out the analyses. PHW drafted the paper, with contributions from all authors. PHW and DGC will act as guarantors for the paper. Footnotes Funding: This study was funded by the Wellcome Trust (grant 051187 Z 97 A). Competing interests: None declared. A figure showing age at menarche, a longer version of the table, and details of the previous studies appear on the BMJ's website References Top Participants, methods, and... Comment References 1. Ellen B.Too much, too young ...Observer, 18Jun 2000;1:4. 2. Eveleth PB, Tanner JM. Worldwide variation in human growth 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 3. Whincup PH, Cook DG, Adshead F, Taylor S, Papacosta O, Walker M, et al. Cardiovascular risk factors in British children from towns with widely differing adult cardiovascular mortality. BMJ 1996; 313: 79-84 [Abstract Free FullText] . 4. Tanner JM. Trend towards earlier menarche in London, Oslo, Copenhagen, the Netherlands and Hungary. Nature 1973; 243: 95-96 [Medline] . (Accepted 15 December 2000) BMJ 2001 Related Articles National guidelines are needed to provide sanitary facilities in primary schools Fiona Finlay and Rosemary Jones BMJ 2001 323: 398. [Extract] [Full Text] Menarcheal age remains the same BMJ 2001 322: 0. [Full Text] This article has been cited by other articles: ( Search Google Scholar for Other Citing Articles ) M. B Pierce and D. A Leon Age at menarche and adult BMI in the Aberdeen Children of the 1950s Cohort Study Am. J. Clinical Nutrition, October1,2005; 82(4): 733 - 739. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] A Maitra, A Sherriff, K Northstone, D Strachan, the ALSPAC Study Team, and A J Henderson Maternal age of menarche is not associated with asthma or atopy in prepubertal children Thorax, October1,2005; 60(10): 810 - 813. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] N. C. Onland-Moret, P. H. M. Peeters, C. H. van Gils, F. Clavel-Chapelon, T. Key, A. Tjonneland, A. Trichopoulou, R. Kaaks, J. Manjer, S. Panico, D. Palli, B. Tehard, M. Stoikidou, H. B. Bueno-De-Mesquita, H. Boeing, K. Overvad, P. Lenner, J. R. Quiros, M. D. Chirlaque, A. B. Miller, K. T. Khaw, and E. Riboli Age at Menarche in Relation to Adult Height: The EPIC Study Am. J. Epidemiol., October1,2005; 162(7): 623 - 632. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] D. A Lawlor and M. Shaw Teenage pregnancy rates: high compared with where and when? J. R. Soc. Med., March1,2004; 97(3): 121 - 123. [Full Text] [PDF] M C J Rudolf, D C Greenwood, T J Cole, R Levine, P Sahota, J Walker, P Holland, J Cade, and J Truscott Rising obesity and expanding waistlines in schoolchildren: a cohort study Arch. Dis. Child., March1,2004; 89(3): 235 - 237. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] R Viner Splitting hairs Arch. Dis. Child., January1,2002; 86(1): 8 - 10. [Full Text] [PDF] F. Finlay and R. Jones National guidelines are needed to provide sanitary facilities in primary schools BMJ, August18,2001; 323(7309): 398 - 398. [Full Text] Rapid Responses: Read all Rapid Responses Define Primary School Irene Fricker bmj.com, 4 May 2001 [Full text] Menarche in India J B Sharma, et al. bmj.com, 9 May 2001 [Full text] Re: Define Primary School R Moody bmj.com, 9 May 2001 [Full text] Re: Define Primary School Peter Whincup bmj.com, 21 May 2001 [Full text] Sex education is still required at an early age Oluwatoyin Ejidokun bmj.com, 6 Jun 2001 [Full text] This article PDF extra: Figure, table and previous studies details Respond to this article Read responses to this article Alert me when this article is cited Alert me when responses are posted Alert me when a correction is posted View citation map Services Email this article to a friend Find similar articles in BMJ Find similar articles in PubMed Add article to my folders Download to citation manager Google Scholar Articles by Whincup, P H Articles by Cook, D G Articles citing this Article PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Whincup, P H Articles by Cook, D G Related content Other sexual medicine Reproductive medicine Related Articles Home Help Search Archive Feedback Table of Contents 2001 BMJ Publishing Group Ltd
Sociobiology Sanitized: The Evolutionary Psychology and Genic Selectionism DebatesSocio-political overview of the circumstances leading to the development of Evolutionary Psychology as distinct from Sociobiology, by Val Dusek. This web page is associated with the Science-as-Culture mailing list and journal.
Science as Culture - SOCIOBIOLOGY SANITIZED: THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND GENIC SELECTIONISM DEBATES Latest Writings and Papers | Home | Contents | Join the Discussion Forum | Rationale | Interesting Links | Feedback | Search | SOCIOBIOLOGY SANITIZED: THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND GENIC SELECTIONISM DEBATES [For more on evolutionary psychology see The Human Nature Daily Review , Evolutionary Psychology Online , The Open Directory ] by Val Dusek Amazon US | UK In the late 1970s I attended meetings at which sociobiologists E. O. Wilson and David Barash, critic Stephen J. Gould, and others were on a panel. Standing blocked by the crowd in the hall outside the doorway to the packed hall I was unable hear the speakers. I spied a little door near the stage, and figured that if I could get to that door, I could get next to the stage and the front row. I sneaked through the hotel kitchen and found the door. Just as I opened it I was passed by a number of African American students who ran up on stage and poured water on Wilson's head. Wilson responded by saying to the audience that he felt like he had been speared by an aborigine. The crowd applauded the martyred Wilson (on crutches at the time--from a skiing accident) and some in the front row muttered epithets at the disrupters and at me, who appeared to have held the door for the demonstrators. The water pitcher story has been repeated scores of times in journalistic accounts, but none of these mention Wilson's racially tinged response. Two decades later the debate concerning the genetic determination of human behavior has been reanimated in the general intellectual and middle-brow media with a somewhat more restrained tone. The study of evolutionary accounts of human behavior is now called "evolutionary psychology" to avoid some of the justifiably bad connotations that were associated with sociobiology. During the last few years the linguist Steve Pinker, ( 1997 ) philosopher Daniel Dennett, ( 1995 ) New Republic editor and science popularizer Robert Wright,( 1994 ) and science writer Matt Ridley ( 1994 , 1997 ) have produced feisty, polemical expositions of evolutionary psychology for a broad audience. Stephen J. Gould has returned to the breach to criticize evolutionary psychology, but several writers considered to be on the left have defended sociobiological approaches and criticized postmodern rejection of biologism. The core theories of evolutionary psychology are the same as those of sociobiology. Several of the commonly made distinctions between evolutionary psychology and sociobiology turn out not to distinguish the two. So what has changed and what is new? I believe part of the difference is a tactical retreat from some of the more belligerently ideological and sexist pronouncements of the past which attracted criticism and condemnation. Another difference is the greater restriction of evolutionary psychology to studies of humans and comparisons with primates, rather than with distantly related species such as insects. Nonetheless, the centrally sexist claims of sociobiology remain in evolutionary psychology, presented in more neutral, theoretical mode of expression. FROM SOCIOBIOLOGY TO EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY Sociobiology initially made an immense media splash and received enormous coverage. However, the rapid counter-attack of biologist critics at Harvard made clear to the academic world, at least, that sociobiology was not, as E. O. Wilson initially attempted to present it, the unanimous utterance of Scientific Authority. Preparing their statement before Wilson's book was printed, equally prestigious biologists, also chaired at Harvard, claimed that the emperor had no clothes. Gould and Richard Lewontin were able to use the pages of The New York Review of Books (NYR) and Natural History to carry out a running battle against sociobiology. Although the preemptive counterstrike by leftist biologists prevented uncritical acceptance of the veracity of sociobiology by the general intellectual community, the sociobiology won on two other fronts. First, in the popular press, notions of character "running in the blood" and "bar room wisdom" about sex differences eased acceptance of "gee whiz" accounts of sociobiology in the major news and popular science magazines. Second, in professional biology, psychology, and anthropology supporters quietly developed networks of supporters with their own technical journals. During the 1980s, while popular attention to sociobiology decreased somewhat, a number of major new technical journals were devoted to sociobiological research. A difference between the evolutionary psychologists (and their philosophical defenders) and the earlier sociobiologists is that Dawkins, not E. O. Wilson has become the paradigmatic hero. Part of this is due to Dawkins' amazingly simple and striking prose, but this hardly accounts for the change. E. O. Wilson produces readable and widely sold book, and he is at least as highly respected by his scientific peers than he was two decades ago, and is further admired by both by both scientists and the public for his later work concerning extinction, endangered species and biodiversity. However Wilson, as point man for sociobiology, from the very start made a number of policy pronouncements, such as concerning the social costs of women entering politics, law and science ( Wilson, 1978 ). The initial preemptive strike against Wilson's big book by Lewontin et. al emphasized the policy pronouncements and close-to-the surface value-judgments concerning entrepreneurship and other social topics. Wilson has more recently allied himself with the fellow Harvard professor Thernstrom in forming an organization to dismiss and denigrate (without any actual investigation) the academic quality of Womens Studies and Ethnic Studies programs. [Flint, Globe] Dawkins, on the other hand, does not make explicit social policy pronouncements. He did once red-bait Gould in the most indirect fashion be introducing criticisms of him with an unrelated anecdote about Soviet troops marching across Britain, but he has never made the sort of open political and policy statements as had E. O. Wilson. Dawkins appears to be solely concerned with the defense and propagation of Science, and is now Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford (which role Dawkins apparently understands as involving the denigration of the humanities). Dawkins' ideology is contained in his biological cosmology. He produces the ideas scientific model for the social Darwinist without drawing any explicit social Darwinist conclusions. Dawkins work is ideology in an even stronger sense that E. O. Wilson's precisely because none of it is explicit. Dawkins can present himself as the pure scientist in contrast to Gould and Lewontin precisely by feigning political unconsciousness and indifference. A number of other developments also occurred during the 1980s that, although not always directly and explicitly linked to sociobiology, helped prepare the ground for the new attempt by sociobiologists under the name of evolutionary psychology at an assault on popular consciousness and the general academic public. While general sociobiological theorizing in the popular press concerning the causes of war, the nature of entrepreneurship, and other matters declined, the immense economic and medical impact of genetic medicine made the public all the more receptive to biological explanations or excuses for social problems. THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT The Human Genome Project and the biotechnology industry splattered the press with announcements of amazing scientific discoveries, both real and imagined. Weekly there were headlines of the discovery of a "gene for" this and that trait. Often these genes for behavioral traits of general interest are merely one link in an immense network of biochemical pathways that produced the trait. Absence of the gene led to absence of the trait, but the gene alone was not sufficient for the trait, with numerous other genes and environmental factors were involved. A number of "breakthroughs" in the discovery of genes for psychological maladies such as manic depression, schizophrenia, and alcoholism turned out to false alarms, but the public was often unaware of the quiet back page retractions of claims that had earlier been trumpeted on the front pages. Nevertheless the weekly assault of newspaper articles claiming the discover of genes for almost everything (including television watching) made the public believe that numerous genes for behaviors and mental conditions had been discovered. Daniel Kosman, editor of Science magazine, could claim authoritatively that the nature-nurture controversy was over and that nature won ( Kosman, 1984 ). THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST ANTHROPOLOGICAL RELATIVISM Another event, more directly linked to sociobiology, was the widely broadcast "discrediting" of the influential anthropologist Margaret Mead, and her cultural relativism. The reigning anthropological view from the end of W.W.II through the ascendance of sociobiology was the cultural variability of human behavior and norms. Margaret Mead, a student of Franz Boas. Boas was important in pioneering anti-racist theory earlier than the British anthropologists. Mead was a major proponent and popularizer of anti-racist as well as anthropological relativist views, influential not only in professional organizations but in popular media. (For instance, she wrote a column of advice and opinion in the women's magazine Redbook.) The discrediting of Mead was an important step in the propagation of sociobiology in America. Shortly after Mead's death, Derek Freeman published a book ( 1983 ), largely prepared decades before, that he had feared to make public while she was still alive to reply. Freeman claimed to show that Mead's account of sexual freedom in Samoa was a myth. The press widely publicized Freeman's claims. Evolutionary psychologists casually refer to Freeman's work ass disproving Mead's claims that sexual and violent behavior are culturally relative. There was a general celebration of Freeman's discrediting of a woman who had been so influential in the scientific societies and popular press. Neglected were the facts that Freeman had studied a different village than that studied by Mead, and studied it four decades later than Mead, during which time a U. S. military based had influenced the behavior of Samoans who worked on the base (for example, rape and assaults had become more frequent). Also, Freeman re-interviewed some of Mead's subjects decades later in the role of an honorary chieftain. An elderly woman might give a different report concerning her teen-age sexual activity to a community official and priest than she would have confided to another young woman at the time. Freeman in his earlier work on Iban agriculture (which contains some hasty racial generalizations) ( 1970 para 59 ) bragged that he had 'devious" ways of getting his subjects to say what he wanted.( 1970, para 63 ). Nonetheless, Mead was portrayed as a silly female who had naively believed in a good human nature, while Freeman was the objective male scientist. Some journalists referred to "Miss Mead" and "Professor Freeman" despite the fact that Mead had many more academic honors than her critic. In fact the detached, supposedly Popperian Freeman had many axes to grind and was as committed to sexual repression, (including being outraged by the display of human genitals on statues in a public park) as Mead was committed to sexual freedom. Writers from psychologist Steve Pinker to science popularizer Martin Gardner write as if Mead was victim of a hoax, and anthropological relativism of cultural and mores is thus totally discredited. THE NEW TWIN STUDIES During the eighties was the extraordinarily wide media publicity for the Minnesota Twin Studies. Shortly after the publication of Wilson's Sociobiology, hereditarians suffered the embarrassment of the exposure of the later twin studies of Sir Cyril Burt as likely frauds. Since Burt's work had been used by Jensen and others to base theories of hereditary racial IQ differences, this left a gap. Thomas Bouchard and colleagues at the University of Minnesota (conveniently in one of the "Twin Cities," home of the Minnesota Twins baseball team.) gained extraordinary publicity in all major US newspapers and magazines for his "eerie" anecdotes about coincidental similarities among twins. Bouchard was unable for almost a decade to receive grants from National Institutes of Health or National Science Foundation, but was supported by the Pioneer Fund which had been founded explicitly to foster the spread of genes of the original white inhabitants of the US (a few years ago the word "white" was deleted from its mission statement, but the fund has a long history of association with segregationist, anti-immigrant and white supremacist figures). Bouchard was also unable for years to get published in a peer reviewed journal for seven years, but during this period was able to publish accounts of his research in all major news magazines and papers in the US.( Dusek, 1987 ) He also introduced a segment on telepathy among twins for the TV show Unsolved Mysteries. Reviewers for Science magazine rejected his research articles, but the political news section of Science published glowing accounts of that same research. Bouchard was claimed by one reporter to have misrepresented his results as published ( Bazell, 1987 ). Many scientists outside of the field assume Bouchard's work is solid, and fellow hereditarians in psychology praise his work even though critics were unable to look at his data. The crucial part of the research is the documentation of the genuine separateness of rearing of the twins, an area where past studies had failed. Leon Kamin has raised doubts about the separateness of Bouchard's most famous pair of twins, the Jewish Nazi pair whose foible of double toilet flushing entered art in the Schwarzenegger De Vito movie Twins. Bouchard's group promised a book length study a decade ago, but it never appeared. The Human Genome Issue of Science published a review article by Bouchard covering research that Science's peer reviewers had earlier rejected. What did this matter if it bolstered the importance of genetic engineering by showing IQ and personality traits were 50% to 80% heritable? Steve Pinker and other scientists follow Bouchard's lead in citing "spooky" and "eerie" coincidences supplied by Bouchard. These include such amazing coincidences as two twins from the wild west who both wear cowboy hats and drink the same brand of beer, twins who live on streets with the same name, or have dogs with the same name. Some of the coincidences (such as twins who both wore seven rings), if not staged for the researchers, are genuinely amazing, but they are hardly amenable to the scientific method. One of Bouchard's colleagues, Lykken, fantasizes about an "emergenesis" statistics that will draw conclusions from single cases, but sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists such as Pinker (who contrast themselves with humanists by touting their own devotion to lawful regularities and replicable findings) appeal to Bouchard's unique coincidence anecdotes to make their case. ( Pinker. 1994 , pp.327-328, 1997 . pp. 21-22). BRAIN IMAGING AND SEX DIFFERENCES Claims have been made since the 1970s concerning differences of male and female brains. One study, which used fewer than a dozen brains of either sex and compared brains of aged women who died of natural causes with those of young men who died mainly in motor accidents apparently measured numerous features of the brain until it found one in which sex differences appeared (the splenium). ( Lacoste-Utamsing and R. Holloway 1982 , Alper 1985 ). This study was publicized with headlines such as His and Hers Brains. An earlier series of studies showed women more able than men to process different messages fed simultaneously into left and right ear, though these studies made no tie with actual brain anatomy. ( Kimura 1987 ) Differences in scores on math aptitude tests of boys and girls were used to infer a male math gene. ( Benbow and Stanley, 1980 ). The genetic explanation was chosen because the boys and girls were claimed to be in the same environment because they had taken the same math classes! This theory lives on. ( Hammer and Dusek, 1995 ) These various claims were popularized in a book which combined them with quotes from Steve Goldberg on the inevitability of patriarchy, and from Michael Levin on the lack of competitiveness and motivation of women and the common but now erroneous claim that there are no female chess grand masters in a popular book Brain Sex: The Real Differences Between Men and Women ( Moir and Jessel, 1991 ) which was in turn made into an even worse video marketed for secondary school classroom use. In the 1990s, however, Functional MRI studies, which are able to trace moment-to-moment changes in glucose concentrations in the brain, were claimed to show definitive differences in brain localization of men and women thinking in a particular linguistic task ( Shaywitz, Shaywitz, and Pugh 1995 ). However only about half the female subjects showed the different localization from the males. The other half of the females showed the same result as the males. Composite color diagrams of a brains with all the male subjects scanning results colored in on one and all the females on another illustrated the article, and this was misinterpreted in the popular press to be a direct photographs of single male and female subject, giving "visual proof" that men and women think differently. "Every social explanation has been exhausted. It is innate." ( Leo, 1995 ). Finally, the initially controversy of E. O. Wilson's sociobiology had been forgotten by many. It took a bit over a decade for the sociobiology debate to recede from memory and many of its theses to be revived under the banner of "evolutionary psychology." NOVELTY AND CONTINUITY IN EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY How does evolutionary psychology differ from sociobiology? Some of its own partisans claim that the name "evolutionary psychology" was explicitly chosen to avoid the negative connotations that had been attached to sociobiology by its critics. Evolutionary psychologists claim that it differs from sociobiology in that sociobiology had emphasized differences, while evolutionary psychology emphasizes similarities or commonalties. This is misleading. Theoretical sociobiological works often discussed human nature and never claimed the significance of race differences. It is true that the National Front and others who uphold biological race differences such as Philip Rushton and racial IQ theorists latched on to sociobiology, but sociobiology itself never claimed that races were significant biological units. Even the Dean of Harvard Medical School, Bernard Davis, (who had asserted that Afro-American physicians would leave a trail of dead bodies after them) denied that races were biologically real entities and in theory upheld Darwinian population thinking, in which species are real, but races or subspecies are minor statistical gradients. Furthermore, though core theoretical sociobiology does not portray dichotomous racial differences, both evolutionary psychology and sociobiology emphasize sex differences, as evolutionarily selected different sexual strategies are claimed to account for much of the personality and behavioral differences between men and women. Another claimed difference that is that evolutionary psychology does not think that our behaviors are adaptations to contemporary living conditions, but are adaptations to our earlier hunter-gatherer lifestyle ( Horgan, 1997 , p. 45). However this is not new either. E. O. Wilson had early claimed that our psychological makeup was jerry-built in the Pleistocene era and not necessarily adaptive to industrialized society ( Wilson, 1978 , p.45). One must be careful not to make criticisms of new theories too easy by falsely reducing them to older, cruder theories, that are easier to refute. Nevertheless, it can be fairly said that the evolutionary part of evolutionary psychology is sociobiology under a new name, as some of its practitioners have admitted. The genetic theories appealed to by evolutionary psychologists are the theories developed in the early 60s by Hamilton (kin selection) and in the 70s by Trivers (reciprocal altruism and parental investment). One area where recent approaches in cognitive science have contributed to the direction of evolutionary psychology is in the emphasis on the modularity of mind. The mind is seen as a Swiss army knife, and ensemble of separate devices for specific behavioral and problem-solving tasks, not a general, totally flexible, problem solving device. Here the atomization of traits in the pan-selectionist version of ultra-Darwinism fits with the cognitive scientists model of the mind as a hodgepodge of special purpose devices. Gould and Lewontin, claim that the evolution of mind is the result of a generalized increase in size and complexity of the brain. Dennett and Pinker deny this. Rather than our particular cognitive capacities being largely side-products of a general evolution of brain complexity and flexibility, the evolutionary psychologists see them asvery particularly selected ( Fodor, 1998 , Gould, 1997 , p. 50). Some novelties in evolutionary psychology are the result of new technology, but conveniently track, in their results, shifts in social views. Sociobiology in the 1970s defended the double standard, female monogamy and male philandering, and claimed to find it in the animal world. A Playboy article entitled "Darwin and the Double Standard" was a quite accurate description of sociobiological theory, better than most popular accounts. However, in the 1990s we find that female birds cheat on their mates. Popular media accounts simply reported this as the latest deliverance of science with implications for humans, without noting the change of viewpoint from the previous view of bird monogamy. Ridley and Pinker attribute this new account solely to the newly available DNA screening. However, one may wonder whether changes of the climate of opinion concerning female virginity and extra-marital sexuality helped support this worldview change. The main differences between evolutionary psychology and sociobiology are in the range of application and tone of language. The sociobiologists expected the public and the non-scientist intellectual community to immediately bow down to their pronouncements. Wilson was rather shocked by the criticisms of his theory, not from creationists, but from some evolutionist colleagues. The early sociobiologists were much more unbuttoned and free-wheeling in their speculations. Wilson discussed genes for "entrepreneurship." The evolutionary psychologists tend to focus on the genetic basis for gender differences and tend not to range quite as far afield in their speculations as did the early sociobiologists. The evolutionary psychologists stay closer to the well-worked out core of their theory. Also the evolutionary psychologists also are somewhat more careful, perhaps for tactical reasons, about their language and tone than were the early sociobiologists. Michael Ghiselin, in The Economy of Nature and the Evolution of Sex, a work that presented implications of the new genetics of kin selection and predated Wilson's book, could be belligerent. "Nice guys finish last," and conclude memorably: "Scratch and altruist and make a hypocrite bleed." Ghiselin also claimed that worker bees who kill male drones are acting as feminists would like to ( Ghiselin, 1974 ). Michael Barash, in a widely used textbook, could say "Ironically, mother nature appears to be a sexist," and smirk at rape, saying "Rape is common among the birds and the bees," and speculate without evidence that human males like male mallard ducks fantasize about their wives being gang-raped ( Barash, 1977 , p. 283, Barash, 1979 , pp. 54, 1978 , 86.) Pierre van den Bergh ( 1978 , p. xiv) stated that he owed his book title Man to the irritation provided by some of my feminist friends." Such blatant sexism did not play well, and with more widespread awareness of rape and a widespread, if much less radical, feminist consciousness, evolutionary psychologists avoid baiting women to the extent that their sociobiologist predecessors did. Indeed Randy Thornhill and others stopped writing of "rape" among insects and wrote instead of "forced copulation." Surprisingly, in the light of this terminological reformation by leading sociobiologists, Dennett gives a qualified defense of rape terminology in animal sociobiology ( 1995 , pp.491-493), claiming in a tu quoque that feminists don't object to the term "lesbian" for certain gulls (Kittiwakes), "homosexual worms" or "mother" in animals. But it is a matter of what associations are developed from the terms. Dennett cites a passage by the Shields which disassociates the term "rape" in sociobiology from human rape. He avoids mentioning the more snickering allusions of Barash. Some critics, including myself, have objected to the misuse of the term "lesbian" for cooperative female Kittiwake pairs, as well as to claims about hummingbird prostitution, and hangingfly transvestitism, and homosexual rapist worms. The "homosexual worms" (spiny-headed worms) -- one of the worst misuses of ordinary language in technical sociobiological literature -- to which Dennett casually refers, are in fact not engaging in homosexual sex at all, but inserting a plug in a competing male worm's sperm duct to prevent it from heterosexually mating. ) Dennett objects to feminists who claim that sociobiological accounts of rape contribute to popular justifications of rape in the law court, but he seems totally unaware of the extent to which sociobiology (including sociobiology of rape) has been popularized in the mass media. Nevertheless, despite the partial terminological retreat by the new evolutionary psychologists, feminism is a still their major target, though they have learned that abusively sexist language can backfire and present their case with more nuance. Pinker, for instance, attacks "Marxists, academic feminists and cafe intellectuals"--an easy target--whom he associates with Marxism, and thereby avoids attacking his women readers in general who tend to hold views that a few decades ago were called feminist. Oddly Pinker, claiming to be an objective scientist, does not simply say that these straw-woman feminists are factually wrong--he has to red-bait them, and appeal to populist resentment of intellectuals (from whom he apparently disassociates himself). The evolutionary psychologists no longer go out of their way to insult women as did Barash or van den Bergh. Indeed Pinker claims that evolutionary psychology makes men look worse than women, aggressive and unfaithful. THE POLITICS OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY Certainly none of the evolutionary psychologists support major egalitarian change in social or gender arrangements. Pinker quotes John Lennon, "Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can. No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man." and writes "Incredible as it may seem, many of us used to believe this treacle" ( Pinker, 1997 , p. 425). While Pinker and Robert Wright consider themselves liberals, of the New Republic, drifting-toward-neo-conservatism sort, Matt Ridley comes out as a nineteenth century libertarian similar the earlier Social Darwinists, in claiming that biology shows us that a libertarian society with minimal state is best ( Papineau,1997 ). What the evolutionary psychologists share, whether liberals like Dennett, neoliberals like Wright and Pinker, or individualist conservatives like Ridley, is a stance of cynical tough-mindedness. Those who oppose evolutionary psychology are religious mystagogues or at least tender-minded wimps, unable to face the cruel truths of natural selection. Their stance is reminiscent of what C. Wright Mills once called Machiaevellianism for the little man. In a populist appeal Pinker ( 1997 ) often contrasts evolutionary psychology with the intellectual establishment of feminism (p. 492) what many intellectuals believe (p. 509), or with the fondest beliefs of many intellectuals (p. 504), and cites Tom Wolfe to ridicule the politics of the cultural elite (p. 502). A few on the left have weighed in favor of sociobiological views. Barbara Ehrenreich, a well-know leftist journalist and political commentator (and formerly graduate student in molecular biology at the Rockefeller Institute) wrote with Janet MacIntosh "The New Creationists" ( Ehrenreich and MacIntosh, 1997 ) which denounced postmodernists as creationists just as evolutionary psychologists lump humanists with Biblical creationists in denying total explanatory power to biological natural selection. The article started with an anecdote resembling those "political correctness" anecdotes manufactured by the foundations of the right about a postmodernist asking someone "Do you believe in DNA?" Evidently to question the omnipotence of DNA is to disbelieve in the existence of DNA for Ehrenreich, who previously authored a rather sociobiological account of the origins of war. This attack on postmodernism in the name of biologism helped inspire the conference of "Left Conservatism" at which a number of literary and gender studies people denounced Ehrenreich, Sokal (of the Social Text hoax), and Katha Pollitt of the Nation magazine for praising Sokal and castigating the cultural studies authors who were objects of his hoax. Despite the terminological peculiarity of the title of the conference, I think that scientism is presently playing a role on the left similar to that which economism played in the past. Philosopher of animal liberation Peter Singer has also stressed the need for the left to embrace Darwinism and claims that this will involve rejection of left's believe in the infinite malleability of human nature. Of course this latter charge hardly applies to all of the left, and Marxists influenced by early Marx have held to the existence of a human nature, though not a static and context-independent one. Followers of some older hereditarian and race-based theories now call themselves "evolutionary psychologists" to seem up to date, just as parts of the French right and British National Front embraced sociobiology. David Buss (the "doctor of love," as one website calls him), a genuine evolutionary psychologist of sex differences in human mating strategies, joined the University of Texas faculty. The already present Texas Adoption Study group now has integrated with Buss in a program in Evolutionary Psychology of Individual Differences (including racial differences). One of their members, Professor Joseph Horn, whose studies allege the intellectual inferiority of Mexican-Americans, and who was at the time head of the conservative National Association of Scholars chapter at UT, had his views exposed by a Chicano student newspaper. The Chicano students noted that Horn as Dean of students, was in a position to implement his views concerning Mexican Americans unfitness for technical or quantitative fields in advising Chicanos. In the name of free speech--evidently for faculty only-- the UT administration prevented distribution of the newspaper. Matt Ridley praises Pinker's lack of "political correctness" when Pinker archly mentions "rainforests--or, as they used to be called, jungles." Actually behavioral geneticists have used the jungle terminology with more controversial effect. Frederick K. Goodwin, then director of Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration and the head of the National Institutes of Mental Health, made a comparison of American inner cities to jungles and their denizens to apes. This lead to an uproar, particular when the Violence Initiative of the US NIMH emphasized genetic factors, and led demonstrations against a conference (fairly balanced in terms of speakers' positions) under the auspices of the Human Genome Project "Genetic Factors in Crime" as racist, cancellation of federal funding and delay of the conference. Evolutionary Psychologist Robert Wright wrote a long and convoluted defense of the jungle analogy in the New Yorker magazine.( 1995 ) Wright noted that the analogy of aggression by low status apes with low serotonin levels was applicable to young white males as well as to African Americans in slums. Wright totally dismissed the claims of racism by noting correctly that the remark was not made with consciously racist intent. But Wright, an editor of the New Republic, and a political pundit as well as popularizer of evolutionary psychology, is surely aware of the racial connotations in the USA of comparisons of inner city residents to apes in jungles GENIC SELECTIONISM AND 'SELFISH GENES" Despite the new name, the general lessening of totally off-the-wall speculation, far-fetched animal analogies to very distantly related species, and the avoidance of grossly sexist remarks, evolutionary psychologists present the same theories as the sociobiologists. Central to the work of most of them is the genic selection theory, claims that genes, not organisms are selected. It is most well known as selfish gene theory in popularizations by Richard Dawkins. This doctrine, genic selectionism, has been criticized by biologists such as Gould and Lewontin, but many journeyman biologists accept the theory, even attributing the details of the theory to Dawkins himself, when he was only popularizing certain trends in genetics and theories of Hamilton and others. The debates concerning evolutionary psychology have revived the debate about genic selectionism. Part of the debate concerns whether genes alone are selected, as Dawkins claims, or whether individual organisms and species (and perhaps also groups) are selected as well. Genic selectionism stems in part from a literal, causal reading of the terms in the equations of population genetics, in which genes rather than phenotypic traits are treated as the objects of selection. Part of its appeal also stems from its reductionistic nature. Selection coefficients can always be calculated for individual genes. Another part of the debate concerns the doctrines of "selectionism" (that natural selection is the sole mechanism of evolution) and "pan-selectionism," (that all traits found have been selected for. Dawkins' "selfish gene" theory claims that selection is for genes and not for organisms (let alone groups or species). This fits with the theory of kin selection, in which and individual can reproduce some of "its" genes by sacrificing itself for a relative which carries a proportion of the altruist's genes. Lewontin has criticized Dawkins' theory by claiming that it confuses classes with individuals. The genes which are reproduced by the relative are not physically identical with the sacrificed individual's genes, but are simply similar, the same kind of gene. Lewontin counters Dawkins claim that an extraterrestrial, to gauge earthly intelligence would ask "Do you understand the theory of natural selection?" with the Platonic question "Do you understand the difference between a class and its members?"--which, according to Lewontin, Dawkins, in his "caricature of Darwinism" flunks. Sober and Lewontin have put the distinction in more philosophical jargon, distinguishing genotokens from genotypes. ( Sober and Lewontin, 1982 , p. 171) Steve Gould was more mellow during the 1980s than during the 1970s and wrote less about biological determinism, returning to natural history topics dear to his heart. However he reentered the lists after a particularly nasty attack by Dennett in the New York Review. The immediate stimulus for Dennett's insults to Gould was Gould's highly negative review of Cronin's The Ant and the Peacock ( Cronin, 1991 ). Helena Cronin, a young, Cambridge-trained philosopher of science defended fairly standard genic selectionism and sociobiology. Cronin's book had a preface by Maynard Smith. Dennett gained Gould's ire by writing of Gould's "non-revolutions" ( Dennett, 1993 ). Maynard Smith, who had previously discussed Gould's work with respect, in a review of Dennett claimed that Gould is so confused that his evolutionist colleagues don't bother to argue with his theoretical claims, but find his popular writings useful in opposing creationism, so avoid debunking his popular reputation as a major evolutionist ( Maynard Smith, 1995 , p.46). It would appear that ties with Cronin prompted Dennett and Maynard Smith to publicly voice their insults to Gould in the NYR. Gould reentered the breach to pen a two-part critique of evolutionary psychology ( 1997 , 1997b ), which in turn elicited letters from Morris, Wright, and Steve Pinker. Dennett had earlier written a feisty attack on theories of Gould, Lewontin, Noam Chomsky, and Stuart Kauffman, who reject a strict selectionist account of evolution and the origin of mind and language. Dennett, in his NYR, letter speaks of Gould's "non-revolutions," claiming that Gould's alternatives to genic selectionism are empty. Gould claims that speciation (the rise of new species) differs in its mechanism from the sort of gradualistic changes observed in the genetics laboratory. Gould also claims that macroevolution, the major main trends evolution, depends in large part of species selection rather than individual or genic selection, thus operating at a different level from the microevolution or the sort observed with breeding fruit-flies. Furthermore, Gould denies selectionism, claiming that many traits have not been selected for and are not particularly adaptive, and coins the term "exaptation" to characterize the functioning of a trait which was not previously selected for or adaptive. He claims this is different from the previous, orthodox neo-Darwinist claim of "preadaptation" where a trait previously selected for one function or adapted to one environment is later selected for another function in a different environment. Dennett denies exaptation differs from preadaptation and accuses Gould of tooting his own horn by inventing a new term for a well-known idea. Gould claims that exaptive traits were not previously selected for, and that preadapted traits were so selected for some other function. Lewontin, Gould, and some other writers have emphasized against selectionism a number of random and non-selective factors in evolution. These include 1) purely random recombination 2) genetic drift, in which random sampling errors in reproduction change the distribution of genes in a population 3) so-called non-Darwinian evolution, which involves the random mutation of the third letter in some DNA code words, in which two or more words are synonyms which code for the same amino acid, and hence the difference in the third letter makes no difference in the resultant organism, and is not selected for (a significant theory Dennett does not even mention) 4) structural constraints, such as basic body plans, which may become far from optimally adaptive, but which are too difficult to change by piecemeal natural selection without making many other features of the organism maladaptive. 5) geological or astronomical catastrophes such as the asteroid collision causing mass extinctions. 6) species selection, in which differing rates of extinction, and, more importantly, speciation (branching) produce more species in some lineages than in others. Dennett simply emphasizes that natural selection works within the parameters of structural constraints and environmental catastrophes, and that species selection is a kind of natural selection (though he neglects to note that it is inconsistent with his following Dawkinsian genic selection), but this does not settle the issue of how much of observed structure is to be attributed to selection and how much to accidental results of catastrophes and non-selective causes. Dennett emphasizes the algorithmic, rule-following, nature of natural selection (and claims that Roger Penrose does not understand what an algorithm is.( 1995 , p. 308) But if that algorithm is applied weakly or not at all in many areas in which environmental catastrophes, developmental constraints, and purely random drift account for major results, then the algorithmic natural selection will not account for many biological features of interest. On the issue of developmental constraints (body plans which once set are difficult for natural selection to change without fatal consequences) Dennett sets up and refutes a straw man on older theories in which such body plan transitions were non-evolutionary mysteries. He than grants that body plans may constrain the direction of natural selection, but tries to play down its significance (p. 277-278). Although Dennett largely follows Dawkins ( in opposition to Gould, Lewontin, and Kaufman) on the nature of evolution and the role of natural selection, he is coy about committing himself to genic selectionism ( 1995 , p. 327). He endorses the reductionism of Dawkins and Steve Weinberg and distinguishes his own from "greedy reductionism" and denies that anyone holds the latter. He writes, "Probably nobody is a reductionist in the preposterous sense, and everybody should be a reductionist in the bland sense" (p. 81). He does make the preposterous sense preposterous by inventing " A Comparison of Keats and Shelley from the Molecular Point of View" and "Explaining the Decisions of The Rehnquist Court in terms of Entropy Fluctuations," (although the latter is not too far from some titles in political science). He claims that preposterous reductionists "want to abandon the principles, vocabulary, laws of higher- level sciences in favor of lower-level terms." ( 1995 , p. 81). However, this leaves open whether the replacement would be in principle possible, even if it is cumbersome and the higher-level vocabulary is maintained for purely practical purposes. When Dennett discusses the debates about levels of selection (whether selection occurs on genes, organisms, groups, species) he claims to have strongly held views but does not reveal them. He claims the issue does not matter. The only reason he gives for this is that whatever is selecting, the selection involves the larger environment and so is not all at the micro-level. But this hardly dissolves the issue of the degree of genetic determinism claimed. The only substantive point that Dennett makes in his hand-waving discussion of levels of selection is that even if genes function only as a "counter" recording the results of selection, counters can be quite important. Dennett refers the reader to Chapter 16 for further explanation, but I can find none there. There is a discussion of the naturalistic fallacy in ethics, but no further discussion of scientific reduction. Apparently all that Dennett means by "draining the drama" from the problem is to deny that awful ethical consequences directly follow logically from selfish gene theory. But this ignores the more indirect ideological consequences in terms of cosmologies or models of nature that in turn can have ethical effects. An interesting sidelight of this is that Dennett, like Dawkins holds the Dawkinsian vision of all lower organisms. The are robots, but we, in Dawkins words can rebel against our genes. Surprisingly Dennett, the militant denier of dualism and of non-naturalistic mind, draws as strong a line between humans and other animals as does Descartes. What Dennett would have to counter is Lewontin and Sober's argument that when selection coefficients of genes are context-dependent and selection acts on gene complexes, the artificially constructed selection coefficients of genes do not play a causal role. ( Sober and Lewontin, 1984 ). It is true that if one claims that what is selected are not genes but replicators as the later Dawkins does, then whole genomes, incorporating all the contextual effects of genes on each other, might be the object of selection. This would preserve the restriction of selection to the genic level, but it would give up the atomization of modular traits with which evolutionary psychologists work. On the other hand Dennett, surprisingly, does not dismiss the "selfish gene" image as a "mere metaphor" as do many scientists (somewhat in bad faith) but claims that if corporations can have interests, then so can genes (neglecting that corporations are made up of individuals who have interests but genes are not) (p. 328). Perhaps Dennett holds a view which "dissolves" the issues concerning reductionism in relation to levels of selection, but he nowhere argues for it of even states it clearly. Although Dennett chastises B. F. Skinner and E. O. Wilson for assuming that their opponents must be religious mysterians, Dennett himself accuses Steve Gould of all people of having secret religious motivations, based on the fact that Gould often quotes the Bible as literature the way he does Shakespeare. Ironically, the one "Biblical" passage in Gould that Dennett quotes is in fact not from the Bible but from a familiar African American song. Similarly Dennett grossly misrepresents the anthropologist Jonathan Marks, portraying him as a new Bishop Wilberforce, denying humans ape ancestry. In fact Marks pointed out the worse than shoddy treatment of data by C. G. Sibley and J. E. Ahlquist in their claims concerning hybridization of human and ape DNA. Dennett makes it sound as if Marks criticisms of Sibley and Ahlquist's data was roundly condemned by the scientific community, as evidenced by an apology in the American Scientist. What Dennett neglects to note is that there was a lawsuit threatened against the magazine threatened by one of the criticized authors because Marks review suggested excessive massaging of the data. Despite the quality of Sibley and Ahlquist's earlier raw data on bird classification based DNA, it is generally agreed that their work on human-ape relationships was worthless, and molecular evolution anthropologist Vincent Sarich has suggested that even the published versions of their bird conclusions is valueless, despite the value of the voluminous but unavailable raw data. Because of Sibley's eminence the human molecular evolution community has been unwilling to criticize the work, for fear of harm to the reputation of the field. This is far from the sort of replay of the Huxley-Wilberforce debate in which Dennett and other evolutionary psychologists wish to portray themselves as involved. Interestingly several of the leading sociobiologists and popularisers of evolutionary psychology, such as E. O. Wilson, Randy Thornhill, and Robert Wright hale from Alabama. One can speculate that the religious fundamentalist atmosphere of the American Deep South may have led those who defected to Darwin to find in Darwinism a cosmic world-view answering the same questions that the dominant religious view claimed to answer. Robert Wright ( 1988 ) is quite explicit about this. CONCLUSION The notion that human beings have evolved from other animals and are a part of biological nature is tremendously important. It is unfortunate and misleading that the evolutionary psychologists make it appear that a commitment to evolution and to the importance of natural selection necessitates a commitment to pan-selectionism, genic selection and the "selfish gene." We have seen how Wilson and now Dennett attempt to identify their opponents with anti-evolutionism. Even Barbara Ehrenreich dubs her opponents the "New Creationists." The split between selfish gene evolutionary psychology and cultural constructionism in anthropology can only prolong the delay in the development of a genuinely evolutionary view of humanity. "Evolutionary psychology" by preempting the field of evolutionary accounts of human nature and potential helps to prevent a non-reductionist biosocial account of humans. REFERENCES Alper, J. (1985) "Sex Differences and Brain Asymmetry: A Critical Analysis," Feminist Studies (11, 1) 7-37. Barash, D. (1977) Sociobiology and Behavior, New York: Elsevier. Barash, D. (1978) "Sexual Selection in Birdland," Psychology Today (March 1978). Barash, D. (1979) Whisperings Within, New York: Penguin. Bazell, R. (1987) " Sins and Twins," New Republic, (Dec. 31) 17-18. Benbow, C. P., and J. C. Stanley (1980) "Sex Differences in Mathematical Ability: Fact or Artifact?" Science 210 1262-1264. Cronin, H (1991) Dennett, D. C.(1993) The Confusion Over Evolution: An Exchange, New York Review of Books (January 14) 43-44. Dennett, D. C.(1995) Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, New York: Simon Schuster. Dusek, V. (1987) "Bewitching Science," Science for the People, vol. 19, no. 6 (Nov. Dec.) 19-22. Ehrenreich, B., and J. MacIntosh, (1997) "The New Creationists: Biology Under Attack" The Nation, Fodor, J., (1998) The Trouble with Psychological Darwinism, London Review of Books, (January 22) from website http: www.Irb.co.uk posted on SCIENCE AS CULTURE listserv Freeman, D. (1970) Report on the Iban, New York: Humanities Press. Freeman, D. (1983) Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, Cambridge: Harvard. Ghiselin , M. T. (1974) The Economy of Nature and the Evolution of Sex, Berkeley: University of California Press. Gould, S. J. (1992) "The Confusion Over Evolution," New York Review of Books, (November 12) 47-54. Gould, S. J. (1997) "Darwinian Fundamentalism," New York Review of Books (June 12) 34-37. Gould, S. J. (1997b) "Evolution: The Pleasures of Pluralism," New York Review of Books (June 26) 47-52. Hammer and Dusek (1995) Horgan, J. (1997) "Darwin in His Mind," Lingua Franca (November 1997), 41-48. Kimura, D. (1987) "Are Men's and Women's Brains Really Different?" Canadian Psychologist, (28, 2) 133-147. Kosman (1984) Lacoste-Utamsing, M. C., and R. Holloway (1982) "Sexual Dimorphism of the Human Corpus Callosum," Science (216) 1431-1432. Leo, J. (1995) "Sex: It's All in Your Brain" U.S. News and World Report 27 February 22. Maynard Smith, J. (1995) "Genes, Memes and Minds," New York Review of Books (November 30) 46-48. Moir, A. and Jessel, D. (1991) Brain Sex: The Real Differences Between Men and Women, New York: Dell. Papineau, D. (1997) Pinker, S. (1994) The Language Instinct, New York: HarperCollins. Pinker, S. (1997) How the Mind Works, New York, W. W. Norton. Rhodes, R.(1981) Why Men Rape, Playboy (April). Ridley, M. (1994) The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, New York: Macmillan. Ridley, M.(1997) The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation, New York, Viking. Shaywitz, B. A., S. E. Shaywitz, and D. R. Pugh (1995) "Sex Differences in the Functional Organization of the Brain for Language, Nature (16 February) 607-608. Sober, E., and R. Lewontin (1982) "Artifact, Cause and Genic Selection," Philosophy of Science 49, no. 2 157-180. van den Berghe, Pierre, (1978) Man: a Biosocial View, New York: Elsevier. Wilson, E. O. (1978) On Human Nature, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press. Wright, R. (1988) Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information, New York: Times Books. Wright, R. (1994) The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life, New York: Random House. Wright, R. (1995) The Biology of Violence, The New Yorker (March 13) 67-77. The Human Nature Review Ian Pitchford and Robert M. Young - Last updated: 23 January, 2002 01:24 PM US - Search: All Products Books Popular Music Classical Music DVD Video Keywords: UK - Search: All Products Books Popular Music Classical Music DVD Video Keywords: | Human Nature | Books and Reviews | The Human Nature Daily Review | Search |
Get RealDaniel Dennett responds to his critics.
Get Real Get Real Reply to 14 essays, in Philosophical Topics, vol. 22, no. 1 2, Spring Fall 1994, pp. 505-568. Daniel C. Dennett Get Real Table of Contents 1. Scale Up in the Fox Islands Thorofare Ivan Fox, "Our Knowledge of the Internal World" 2. Dretske's Blind Spot Fred Dretske, "Differences That Make no Difference" 3. Truth-Makers, Cow-sharks and Lecterns Brian McLaughlin John O'Leary-Hawthorne, "Dennett's Logical Behaviorism" Mark Richard, "What Isn't a Belief?" Lynn Rudder Baker, "Content Meets Consciousness" Stephen Webb, "Witnessed Behavior and Dennett's Intentional Stance" 4. Superficialism vs. Hysterical Realism Georges Rey, "Dennett's Unrealistic Psychology" 5. Otto and the Zombies Joseph Levine, "Out of the Closet: A Qualophile Confronts Qualophobia" Robert Van Gulick, "Dennett, Drafts and Phenomenal Realism" 6. Higher Order Thoughts and Mental Blocks David Rosenthal, "First-Person Operationalism and Mental Taxonomy" Ned Block, "What is Dennett's Theory a Theory of?" 7. Qualia Refuse to go Quietly Joseph Tolliver, "Interior Colors" Stephen White, "Color and Notional Content" Jeff McConnell, "In Defense of the Knowledge Argument" Eric Lormond, "Qualia! (Now Showing at a Theater near You)" 8. Luck, Regret and Kinds of Persons Michael Slote, "The Problem of Moral Luck" Carol Rovane, "The Personal Stance" There could be no more gratifying response to a philosopher's work than such a bounty of challenging, high-quality essays. I have learned a great deal from them, and hope that other readers will be as delighted as I have been by the insights gathered here. One thing I have learned is just how much hard work I had left for others to do, by underestimating the degree of explicit formulation of theses and arguments that is actually required to bring these issues into optimal focus. These essays cover my work from top to bottom. Just about every nook and cranny is probed and tested in ways I could never do for myself. The essays thus highlight the areas of weakest exposition of my views; they also show the weak points of the views themselves--and suggest repairs, which I am sometimes happy to accept, but not always, since there are a few cases in which one critic deftly disarms another, sight unseen. I will be fascinated to learn how the individual authors react to each other's essays, since they side with me on different points, and disagree about what is still in need of revision or repair. To me the most interesting pattern to emerge is the frequency with which the criticisms hinge on mistaken assumptions about the empirical facts. Since I have long maintained that ignoring the relevant science is the kiss of death in philosophy of mind, no project could be dearer to my heart than showing how paying attention to such non-traditional details is the key to progress. So I will give pride of place to my responses to Ivan Fox and Fred Dretske, whose essays show most vividly the need for joining forces with cognitive science. Then I will turn to the others, following my usual order: considering content first, then turning to consciousness, and finally, to the ethical considerations of personhood. It hardly needs saying that this essay, long as it is, would be twice as long if I responded to all the points raised that deserve discussion. Endnote 1 1. Scale Up in the Fox Islands Thorofare Endnote 2 Ivan Fox's essay may very well be the most important essay in the collection, an original breakthrough in phenomenology that can really move us into a new understanding--or it may not be. I just can't tell. I have by now spent many hours struggling with it, an experience that puts me in mind of one of the delights of sailing on the coast of Maine: the exhilarating phenomenon known as scale up. You are sailing along in a dense pea-soup fog, the sails dripping, the foghorn moaning nearby but unlocatable in the white-out, visibility less than fifty yards; you move cautiously, checking and double-checking the compass, the depth sounder, the chart, looking out for dangers on all sides, working hard and feeling tense and uncertain, and then all of a sudden you sail out of the fogbank into glorious sunshine, with miles of visibility, blue sky, sparkling water, a fresh breeze. Yeehah! That's the way I felt reading his paper. There were long patches of fog that I struggled through, unsure I knew where I was or where I was headed, and then suddenly I'd find myself bathed in clear, insightful going, a novel course through recognizable landmarks. Yeehah! Then back into the fog, anxiously waiting for the next scale up. We Downeasters have learned to take a perverse pleasure in living through the foggy passages for the rewards of a good scale up. But in philosophy there ought to be a better way. It is not that Fox has overlooked an easy way of proceeding; anyone who has actually tried hard to say what happens in conscious perception will appreciate that he is not making up difficulties and fancy ways of dealing with them. The more straightforward ways of saying what happens are all seriously confused and deeply misleading, for the reasons he enunciates--a verdict my commentaries on some of the other essays will support in due course. A better way--not an easier way--would get clearer about what the rules of such an enterprise are, what counts as being right or wrong, what sorts of implications and applications these ideas have. Here is my methodological proposal. If Fox is on an important new track, as I suspect, then it ought to be possible to recast all of it--all of it--in terms that have a direct and helpful bearing on a project I am working on these days: the Cog project in robotics, directed by Rodney Brooks and Lynn Andrea Stein at the AI Lab at MIT. Cog is a humanoid robot, situated in real (not virtual) space and time, with human-sized eyes, arms, hands, and torso that move like human body parts, innervated by sensors for "touch" and "pain" (scare-quotes for the squeamish), and designed to undergo a long period of "infancy," not growing larger, but learning hand-eye coordination and much, much more--e.g., folk physics and even folk psychology--the way we human beings do: by being experientially embedded in a concrete world of things that can harm, help and otherwise "interest" it. (Dennett, 1994) Cog will have to track individual objects, reidentify them, interact gracefully with them, protect its own bodily integrity and safety, and--in our fondest blue sky aspirations--come to talk about its life, its subjectivity, in this concrete world it shares with us. Among the opportunities and problems that Cog will confront are instances very much like Fox's example of pulling the thorn from the finger. So will Cog's cognitive architecture have to incorporate his "surrogates"--representatives instead of "representations"? That sounds very much like the idealogy for which Rodney Brooks is famous in AI circles. He is, after all, the author of "Intelligence without Representation," (1991), one of the most influential manifestos of the new anti-GOFAI (and hence anti-LOT) Endnote 3 school of AI, and like Fox, he has all along stressed the practical importance of not interposing intellectualist systems of sentential objects between input and output in robots that must cope in real time and space. When Fox speaks of our creating the Cartesian modes as a reflection that does not disturb the underlying Empedoclean modes of acquaintance, this is thus tantalizingly close to Brooks' subsumption architecture, in which new sophistications have to be piled on top of earlier systems of distributed perceptuo-locomotory prowess. One might well wonder if Fox has simply re-invented some of Brooks's wheels, in a daunting new vocabulary, so perhaps, after all, he has no new insights to offer to the Cog team, who long ago turned their backs on High Church Computationalism, in spite of their domicile at the East Pole (Dennett, 1987). Or perhaps he has seen, from his phenomenological and philosophical vantage point, some crucial sharpenings and advances that the Cog team must come to appreciate and somehow honor in their engineering if they are ever to get Cog to do what they want Cog to do. My first ambition was to figure out for myself what the "take home message" of Fox's essay would be for the Cog group. Translating phil-speak points into their terms is a task I often undertake these days, and I find it is always a salutary exercise. The faculty and graduate students in the group are both open-minded and astonishingly quick studies--utterly unfazable by technicalities, both theoretical and empirical. But they are also deeply practical; they are embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious and difficult project, and any advice offered had better actually rule something out that they might have been tempted to try, or rule something in that they might otherwise have overlooked. They won't be impressed if you tell them that unless they ensure that Cog has x, Cog won't have, say, intrinsic intentionality--unless you can go on to demonstrate that without intrinsic intentionality (whatever you take that to be), Cog will blunder about, or fail to acquire the sought-for competences, or go all Hamlet-like in some combinatorial explosion of futile looping, or destroy itself. If Cog can locate the thorns, readily recognize their negativity, be moved somehow by this recognition to attempt to remove them, and succeed (in jig time), it will be hard to sell the Cog team on the complaint that Cog nevertheless lacks the je ne sais quoi that distinguishes our own acts of thorn-removal. But I have been simply unable to state to myself with any confidence what Fox's message is, in the end. Cog's manifest image, he seems to be saying, must incorporate an ontology that is irreducibly naive--an ontology that resists going in either of the two directions sophisticated philosophical analysis demands. I think this is an extremely promising idea, but what does it mean in implementation terms? What shouldn't be there and what should be there? How does one get "gestalting" into Cog's processes, for instance, and how do you tell if you've succeeded? I cannot answer these questions yet. I encourage Fox to pose the problems for himself. I am not so swept up in this robotics project, or so doctrinaire, as to require that anything worth doing in philosophy of mind be translatable into valuable Cog-speak. There may well be many important projects in philosophy of mind or phenomenology that have scant bearing, or no bearing at all, on the particular problems of engineering and robot psychology confronting the Cog team. But for an enterprise that is in danger of losing its grip on reality--a common enough danger in all areas of philosophy--this is at least a way of virtually guaranteeing that whatever one asserts or denies tackles a real problem (however wrongheadedly). There are plenty of passages in Fox's essay that encourage me to think that he does aspire to inform such engineering projects. Since he readily allows fish to have surrogates in thought [p27], I doubt if he would turn up his nose at robot cognition. He dismisses one model of how one picks up a cup by saying "Life is too short, and there is too much of routine in action to make this a feasible or worthwhile cognitive architecture." [p20]. He also speaks of the "Mac-wiring of the two-worlds system" as the feature that ensures that the external object is appropriately treated by the agent's fears, desires and plans. Here (and elsewhere) he seems to be giving "the specs"--but in philosophical, not engineering, terms--for the only sort of system that can achieve good, real, effective (or at any rate our kind of) cognition. As he says, "This experienced directness is the entitlement of unreflective naive realism accomplished through surrogate objects. It is not available to a mind that perceives by way of representations and acts solely on information." [p.28] At other times, it seems as if he chickens out, recanting this aspiration altogether. For we learn in the end that "if we cannot distinguish behaviorally" between a Cog that has surrogates and a Cog that uses representations, "this shows the limits of behaviorism." [p56]. He goes right on to say that his distinction is "as objectively determinable as any fact of cognitive architecture" but one wonders what practical importance (e.g., for the rush of controlling behavior in real time) this difference of cognitive architecture has, and how, from the third-person point of view, we can determine this objective difference. Endnote 4 I do not think this is a minor criticism. When Husserl made his famous distinction between the hyletic and noetic phase, he neatly saved Phenomenologists from dirtying their hands with the grubby physical details of the hyletic phase, but only at the very serious risk of trivializing Phenomenology for all time. The breath of fresh air (and sparkling sunshine) in Fox's phenomenology is his recognition, at many points and in many ways, that his enterprise is a species of extremely abstract engineering, but then he too often seems to me to shrug off the hard questions as somebody else's responsibility. Endnote 5 When Fox says "The body of the Other warps the structure of phenomenal space-time and draws mine to it along the geodesic of desire," [p51] that's a nifty description of the wonderful effect achieved by our brains. But we want to know: how is it done? His claims about surrogates strike me as a very useful proposal, somewhat along the lines of similar suggestions by Ruth Millikan (e.g., 1993), and these promise a route for getting away from the language of thought. Fine, but now either you pass the buck entirely to the engineers and just declare that the problem has a solution (no doubt it does), or you attempt to contribute to the solution. I'm not asking for wiring diagrams, but just for a closer rapprochement--something I could tell to the Cog team that they could understand. By insensible phylogenetic degrees the phenomenal world emerges at the turning point of the reflex arc. I do not doubt that there is something which it is like to be a bat, or a bee. . . . The dimwitted orgasm of an earthworm is as truly phenomenology as our own multimedia experience. What is marvelous about our phenomenology is not that it is phenomenology but that it is marvelous phenomenology--nature's three billion year solution to the problem of achieving in one state the surrogate of the perceived world; a world within a world conceived by nature in its own image. No doubt this engineering feat requires very special properties. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and the phenomenal world is silk purse phenomenology. [p46] And what does Fox have to say about how to accomplish this engineering feat? His opening gambit of explaining the phenomenal world via the metaphor of the Mac user-interface is cute, but I fear it backfires. Endnote 6 If "the phenomenal world is the end of the line," [p11] this implies that there are no further internal users or appreciators or perceivers, but then this is a major disanalogy with the user illusion of the word processor. He seems to be saying--and I very much agree--that the phenomenal world is the emergent product of all the corner-turning (Consciousness Explained [hereafter CE], 1991, pp108-111), not the preamble or final raw material before the corner of consciousness is turned. The Mac user-interface, however, isn't the end of the line; it is designed to present material to a user--that's the whole point of it. And its engineering is indeed tricky, but nowhere near as tricky as the engineering that seems to be required for Fox's phenomenal world, in which round-for-all-intents-and-purposes and its brethren must be implemented. If this is virtual roundness--like the virtual hardness of the virtual cast on Marcel Marceau's arm (CE p.211)--then an abyss opens up. How do you make it true that "surrogate objects and their properties track external objects and their properties"? [p10] Zenon Pylyshyn has often warned cognitive scientists not to posit what he memorably calls "mental clay," a magical material out of which to fashion internal surrogates whose causal properties automatically track the physics of their external counterparts. Donald Knuth, a hero of computer programmers everywhere, made a lovely innovation in text-formatting technology when he invented virtual "glue," a virtually elastic and virtually sticky substitute for the rigid space called up by the typewriter space bar. Putting a varying virtual dab between each pair of words, depending on their relative lengths, his formatting program then virtually stretched the word-string by virtually pulling on its virtual ends till it fit perfectly between the left and right margins, apportioning just the right among of extra white space for each gap between words. Fortunately, Knuth didn't also have to make his word-processing glue virtually shiny, tasty, and smelly, but Fox's surrogates, in contrast, seem to have a full complement of for-all-intents-and-purposes perceptual properties. "To serve as a surrogate for an F thing in this system, an internal object must have such causal properties as enable it to be the target of F relevant object attitudes and to govern the ensuing action in F relevant ways." [p21] Beyond allowing that so far as he is concerned, surrogates can literally have some of the relevant causal properties--they can be literally ellipsoid, or "an unindividuated color" for instance [p22]--Fox is silent on how to deal with this problem. I fear his silence is proxy for "And then a miracle happens." I hope I have misunderstood him. If Fox's surrogates are not literally surrogates, made of mental clay, what are they? If they are intentional objects, Fox's phenomenology reduces to my heterophenomenology, an account of the believed-in entities, only on occasion and indirectly an account of the internal states and processes. That is fine with me, but then his claim to have pushed beyond heterophenomenology to a radically different ontology must evaporate. Too bad, since we all need to push further into the engineering, and not just revel in the specs. Endnote 7 2. Dretske's Blind Spot Fred Dretske is wonderfully direct in his essay. No glancing blows here; one of us is flat wrong. And surprisingly, for a philosophical essay, our differences--if I understand him--have quite directly testable empirical consequences. In a passage Dretske quotes, I say that "the richness of the world outside, in all its ravishing detail . . . does not 'enter' our conscious minds, but is simply available," to which he forthrightly retorts: "This is false. . . . Our experience of this ravishing detail does cease when we close our eyes. So the ravishing detail is not only 'in' the world." I do not know why he thinks this last bit follows, unless he is mistakenly assuming that our experience of ravishing detail must itself be ravishingly detailed, but this is just what is called in question by recent experiments that dramatically support my version of the facts. Even more telling, a recent thought experiment of Dretske's (in "Conscious Experience," 1993) perfectly anticipates one of these real experiments and encourages us to imagine an outcome seriously at odds with the actual results. Endnote 8 But before we get to that dnouement, I must set the stage. Dretske has been a firm believer in the importance of "non-epistemic seeing" ever since his 1969 book, Seeing and Knowing, which I did read and admire when it came out, but he did not at all persuade me of the importance of non-epistemic seeing. (Many of the difficulties I saw were picked up by Virgil Aldrich in his 1970 J.Phil. review of the book, by the way.) Dretske uses non-epistemic seeing to mark what he takes to be a theoretically important category: "entering conscious experience." His isolation of non-epistemic seeing struck me in 1969 as at best a harmless tidbit of ordinary language philosophy; now I think it is worse: a theorist's illusion, pure and simple, an artifact of taking ordinary language too seriously. There is no important difference--no difference that makes a difference--between things non-epistemically seen (e.g., the thimble in front of Betsy's eyes before she twigs) and things not seen at all (e.g., the child smirking behind Betsy's back). Endnote 9 Common usage does, as he says, endorse a third-person use of "see." As he puts it now: "Ask someone! Other people may be able to supply information which, together with what you already know, helps you discover what (or who) you saw." (fn15) For instance, you're standing deep in the waving crowd as Hillary Rodham Clinton's motorcade passes by--"I wonder if she saw me!" you exclaim, and your companion says "Sure--you're tall enough, her eyes were open, and she kept looking back and forth from one side of the street to the other. If you saw her, she saw you." Big deal. (While we're doing ordinary language philosophy, notice that your companion might just as naturally have said "Since you could see her, she could see you." This raises a difficult question for Dretske to answer: how does visible to A at time t differ in meaning from non-epistemically seen by A at time t? Does it follow from the fact that Ms. Clinton could see you that she did see you?) The third-person-attributable usage Dretske draws to our attention is common enough, but it survives on ignorance--the everyday ignorance of ordinary folk about how their visual systems work. It assumes, roughly, that if your eyes are wide open and you're awake, then everything that is "right in front of your eyes" has a common marked status--the status Dretske marks as seen (in the non-epistemic sense). The idea is that this is all it takes, normally, to get a visible thing registered (or "exhibited" as he now says) in the sighted person's "consciousness". Not being able to see inside people's heads to confirm that the imagined normal registration has in fact taken place, we treat the outward signs as proof enough. We can honor this status in a sort of legalistic way if we desire, but the facts about human vision render this understanding Pickwickian in the extreme. (If your transpacific plane touches down for refueling in Tahiti and you sleep through the landing and takeoff, can you say you've been to Tahiti? Yes, you can. Big deal.) Ordinary folk do not realize that one's "visual field" is gappy, degrades shockingly in resolution in the parafoveal regions, and--most important of all--is not recorded for comparison from moment to moment. Long before there was film, there were cameras. The camera obscura is literally a dark room with a pinhole opening (perhaps enhanced by a lens) in one wall, and on the opposite wall a full-color (upside-down) image of the outside world is exhibited, evanescently, for onlookers inside the camera to see and enjoy. The room doesn't see, of course, even though the information is there on the wall. Suppose I walk by a vacant camera obscura and make a face in the direction of its pinhole. This guarantees that my smirk, in high resolution color, was briefly present on the opposite wall--an inert historical fact. Big deal. A camera obscura does not in any sense see what is exhibited on its wall. Or consider a camcorder, turned on but not recording. Unlike the wall of the camera obscura, there are photosensitive elements here that are evanescently changed by the photons raining down on them, but they change back immediately, leaving no trace. Even when the camcorder is recording, it still doesn't see, of course, but intuitively it takes a step in the right direction, since it records (some of) that information, for some later use, appreciation, analysis. A trace is made; the information sticks around. But presumably a camcorder doesn't do enough with the information to count as seeing, even when it makes a record of what happens. It is a problem for Dretske to say what more is needed for non-epistemic seeing to occur. He makes an analogy: "seeing is like touching" [p.3]. We may ask: Is it like a rock touching the soil it is embedded in, or like a tree's roots touching that soil, or is it like a mole's paws touching it? Presumably the last of these, but why? Not, apparently, because moles have "conceptual" categories that can sort the information; seeing can occur "in the absence of conceptual uptake" [p.2], and "your experience can exhibit even though you may not be able to judge that something is ." [p.14] Presumably, the mole's experience "exhibits" the soil, but the tree is just as much in contact with the soil, and responds, slowly, to that contact. What more would be needed for the tree to exhibit the soil in its experience? This is a good place to see the stark contrast between Dretske's view and mine. "The difference," he says, "between a visual experience and a belief about what you experience seems reasonably clear pre-theoretically." [p.9] I agree--it seems to be, but this is one of those treacherous philosophical observations. He says it is impossible to give a plausible theory of consciousness as long as experience and belief are conflated; I say it is impossible to give a plausible theory of consciousness as long as experience is deemed to be entirely independent of belief--or something rather like belief. Belief is not quite the right term for the job, as I have noted. When Dretske says that the micro-cognitions I substitute for beliefs do "precisely" what potential or suppressed beliefs did for Armstrong and Pitcher, he misses a major point: I was deliberately getting away from their mistaken personal-level treatment of the issue, so my micro-cognitions do an importantly (precisely) different job. The personal level treatment misconstrues the facts--in the ways and for the reasons that Dretske points out: One has certainly not shown that seeing an object, being perceptually aware of a thimble, consists in a judgment that it is a thimble (or anything else) in anything like the ordinary sense of the word 'judgment'.[p10] Exactly right. You have to go to a non-ordinary sense of the word 'judgment' to make this claim hold, and hold it must, since otherwise we are stuck unable to tell the camera obscura from the genuine seer. What a genuine seer must do is somehow take in and "categorize" or "recognize" or "discriminate" or "identify" or . . . . (each term stretched out of its ordinary field) . . . in some other way "judge" the presence of something (as a thimble or as something else). With such uptake there is seeing. Otherwise not. Dretske asks [p.4] "Are we really being told that it makes no sense to ask whether one can see, thus be aware of, thus be conscious of, objects before being told what they are?" Yes, in one sense, and no, in another. I am indeed challenging the claim that there is a coherent sense of "conscious" and "aware" and "see" linked in the manner of his question, but I quite agree that it "makes sense" to ask Dretske's question in the course of some ordinary affairs; it also makes sense to speak of the sun setting, and of breaking somebody's heart. Notice that Dretske's sense of "see," ordinary and familiar though it is, is utterly powerless to deal with the following questions: (1) Does the blindsight subject see objects in the blind field? He can react to them in some ways and not others. (2) Does the blue-eyed scallop see? It has eyes. Endnote 10 (3) Does a sleepwalker see? He engages in visually guided locomotion. (4) Does the anesthetized person with open eyes see? (5) Does the hysterically blind person see? (6) Do you see objects that are parafoveal in your visual field? How far parafoveal? It is obvious that in order to answer any of these questions, we have to go beyond the ordinary grounds for attributing seeing--which draw a blank--and ask what is going on inside. To a first approximation, the question then becomes: is what is going on inside more like what happens in a vacant camera obscura or more like what happens in a camcorder when it is recording? Is there uptake, and if so of what? And the answer is that to a surprising degree, the visual part of your brain is more like a camera obscura than you might have thought. On the last page (468) of CE, I described an experiment with eye-trackers that had not been done, and predicted the result. The experiment has since been done, by John Grimes (forthcoming) at the Beckmann Institute in Champaign Urbana, and the results were much more powerful than I had dared hope. I had inserted lots of safety nets (I was worried about luminance boundaries and the like--an entirely gratuitous worry as it turns out). Grimes showed subjects high-resolution color photographs on a computer screen, and told the subjects to study them carefully, since they would be tested on the details. (The subjects were hence highly motivated, like Betsy, to notice, detect, discriminate, or judge whatever it was they were seeing.) They were also told that there might be a change in the pictures while they were studying them (for ten seconds each). If they ever saw (yes, "saw," the ordinary word) a change, they were to press the button in front of them--even if they could not say (or judge, or discriminate) what the change was. So the subjects were even alerted to be on the lookout for sudden changes. Then when the experiment began, an eyetracker monitored their eye movements, and during a randomly chosen saccade changed some large and obvious feature in each picture. (Some people think I must be saying that this feature was changed, and then changed back, during the saccade. No. The change is accomplished during the saccade, and the picture remains changed thereafter.) Did the subjects press the button, indicating they had seen a change? Usually not; it depended on how large the change was. Grimes, like me, had expected the effect to be rather weak, so he began with minor, discreet changes in the background. Nobody ever pressed the button, so he began getting more and more outrageous. For instance, in a picture of two cowboys sitting on a bench, Grimes exchanges their heads during the saccade and still, most subjects don't press the button! In an aerial photograph of a bright blue crater lake, the lake suddenly turns jet black--and half the subjects are oblivious to the change, in spite of the fact that this is a portrait of the lake. (What about the half that did notice the change? They had apparently done what Betsy did when she saw the thimble in the epistemic sense: noted, judged, identified, the lake as blue.) What does this show? It shows that your brain doesn't bother keeping a record of what was flitting across your retinas (or your visual cortex), even for the fraction of a second that elapses from one saccade to the next. So little record is kept that if a major change is made during a saccade--during the changing of the guards, you might say--the difference between the scene thereafter and the scene a fraction of a second earlier, though immense, is typically not just unidentifiable; it is undetectable. The earlier information is just about as evanescent as the image on the wall in the camera obscura. Only details that were epistemically seen trigger the alarm when they are subsequently changed. If we follow Dretske's usage, however, we must nevertheless insist that, for whatever it is worth, the changes in the before and after scenes were not just visible to you; you saw them, though of course you yourself are utterly clueless about what the changes were, or even that there were changes. Dretske says: "Part of what it means to say that Sarah sees all five fingers is that if you conceal one of the fingers, things will look different to Sarah. . . . There will not only be one less (visible) finger in the world, but one less finger in Sarah's experience of the world." [ms, p.12] Then I suppose it follows, trivially, that in Grimes' experiments, things "look different"--even hugely different--to his subjects after the saccadic switcheroo. This is, however, vacuous, given subjects' utter lack of uptake of the difference. In what sense do things look different to them? Things "look different" in the vacant camera obscura when I duck out of sight after my smirk, but they don't look different to anybody. The difficulty with Dretske's view of non-epistemic seeing comes out even more strikingly in an experiment recently conducted by Rensink, O'Regan and Clark (forthcoming). Provoked by Grimes' result, and thinking it had nothing to do with saccades (but everything to do with "uptake" of some kind), they presented subjects with pictures that are interrupted, every quarter of a second (250msec) with a black screen which remains on for 150msec. The resulting phenomenology is rather annoying: a stable picture briefly interrupted, again and again and again. But in fact, subjects are told, the picture changes during each interruption, going back and forth between two pictures, with a rather large and visible difference between them. For instance, the huge airplane that almost fills the picture grows an extra engine on its wing twice a second. Back and forth, back and forth go the two pictures of the plane, but you can't see any change at all! The two pictures appear to you to be exactly the same. You study them, focussing, scanning, inventorying, and then eventually, after perhaps twenty or fifty back-and-forths, you notice the change. Sometimes, in spite of thirty seconds of steady hunting, the subjects still fail to see (epistemically) the change. This produces the same helpless and frustrating state of Betsy hunting for the thimble. She knows it's there, right in front of her nose, and she can't see it! But on Dretske's account, the difference is there, back and forth, being "exhibited" in consciousness, in non-epistemic seeing. In fact, he gives an example (1993, p.273) of just such a pair of pictures, which he calls Alpha and Beta. The difference between them is that Spot (a good-sized round dot) is in Alpha but absent in Beta. Everyone who looks at Alpha, and then at Beta, Dretske says, is "thing-aware of Spot" even though many people may not be "fact-aware" of the difference. In saying that the reader is conscious of Spot--and, hence, in this sense, the difference between Alpha and Beta--without being conscious of the fact that they differed, we commit ourselves to the possibility of differences in conscious experience that are not reflected in conscious belief. (p.275) He imagines an objection: The differences are out there in the objects, yes, but who can say whether these differences are registered [my emphasis] in here, in our experience of the objects? . . . This is a way of saying that conscious experiences, the sort of experiences you have when looking around the room, cannot differ unless one is consciously aware that they differ. . . . This objection smacks of verificationism, but calling it names does nothing to blunt its appeal. (p.277) Right. Dretske recognizes that he needs something better than name calling to fend off this objection, so he offers a final example, drawn from Kluver's studies of size discrimination in monkeys. But he begs the question in his account of how one would have to describe the monkeys' capacity, so it doesn't in fact provide any further support for his way of looking at seeing. Endnote 11 There is no doubt that the periodic changes in the Rensink et al. experiment are "exhibited" on one's retinas, and hence one's primary visual cortex, to anybody who looks at these parts of the nervous system, with the right equipment. But if you (or your homuncular agents) do not in fact "look at" most of these exhibits with any equipment at all, the only sense in which these changes are "registered" is the sense in which the changes are also registered inside a camcorder that is turned on, but not recording. This is, in fact, the normal situation--powerfully revealed in this abnormal environment. If Dretske wants to say that this is all he meant by non-epistemic seeing, he is welcome to the concept, but it is not a persuasive model of "conscious experience." I may have just slightly exaggerated the evanescence of the "registration" in primary visual cortex in comparing it to the temporary changes in a camcorder's photo-sensitive elements. Perhaps there is enough long term uptake in the brain so that, although you can't readily notice changes, if given a forced choice guess about whether or not there has been a change, you will do better than chance. Suppose we show subjects two kinds of picture pairs: pairs like the most difficult of those in the Rensink experiment, and pairs that are in fact identical. They will look just alike to subjects--they will detect no changes. But if required to guess which pictures do involve a change, they might well do better, even much better, than chance, in spite of their utter inability to say what these changes might be. (This experiment is currently under development in Rensink's lab.) If subjects can make good forced choice guesses, this would conclusively show that some information was preserved from moment to moment, that there was some non-ephemeral "registration" after all. This would not serve Dretske's purposes, however, by giving him a "difference which makes a difference" on which to hang non-epistemic seeing in conscious experience, since this performance on forced choice guessing is precisely the evidence standardly relied on to demonstrate unconscious information preservation in blindsight. I doubt that Dretske would want blindsight to count as non-epistemic seeing. So, to revert to the confrontation with which we began, Dretske noted what he takes to be a clear mistake of fact in my theory of consciousness. I say the detail only seems to be "in there" and he disagrees. I agree that it is in the eye (focused on the retina), but that is surely not enough, for in that sense, the detail is also in the camera obscura. Most of this detail is not--and cannot be--picked up at all, but some of it is. The few details that are picked up are picked up by being identified or categorized in some fashion--if only as blobs worthy of further consideration, as Treisman's experiments show. Endnote 12 It does indeed seem as if all the details are "in here" in some stronger sense--a difference that makes a difference--but that is an illusion. 3. Truth-Makers , Cow-sharks and Lecterns McLaughlin and O'Leary-Hawthorne have succeeded where others have tried and failed. They have obliged me to respond, in detail worthy of their challenge, to the question: why don't I take Swampman, Blockheads, and their friends seriously? They have obliged me by writing an exemplary essay, fair, patient and reasonable, setting out the problems with my view as they (and many other philosophers) see them. They provide a compelling exhibition of something philosophers should more often strive for: a consideration of ideas that transcends questions of who said what when. Which of the many variations of the ideas they consider is mine? Which did I mean? It doesn't much matter, since they canvass all the possibilities, and try to show which is the best--given my purposes--and why. If I didn't say or mean that, I should have. Or so they claim, with supporting reasons. First let me confirm a suspicion that they hint at occasionally: I have not thought that such fanatic attention to precise formulations was work worth doing; I still think that this is largely make-work, but there are many, apparently, who think I am wrong, and I owe them, in my response to this challenge, a proper reply. It cannot have escaped philosophers' attention that our fellow academics in other fields--especially in the sciences--often have difficulty suppressing their incredulous amusement when such topics as Twin Earth, Swampman, and Blockheads are posed for apparently serious consideration. Are the scientists just being philistines, betraying their tin ears for the subtleties of philosophical investigation, or have the philosophers who indulge in these exercises lost their grip on reality? These bizarre examples all attempt to prove one "conceptual" point or another by deliberately reducing something underappreciated to zero, so that What Really Counts can shine through. Blockheads hold peripheral behavior constant and reduce internal structural details (and--what comes to the same thing--intervening internal processes) close to zero, and provoke the intuition that then there would be no mind there; internal structure Really Counts. Manthra is more or less the mirror-image; it keeps internal processes constant and reduces control of peripheral behavior to zero, showing, presumably, that external behavior Really Doesn't Count. Swampman keeps both future peripheral dispositions and internal states constant and reduces "history" to zero. Twin Earth sets internal similarity to maximum, so that external context can be demonstrated to be responsible for whatever our intuitions tell us. Thus these thought experiments mimic empirical experiments in their design, attempting to isolate a crucial interaction between variables by holding other variables constant. In the past I have often noted that a problem with such experiments is that the dependent variable is "intuition"--they are intuition pumps--and the contribution of imagination in the generation of intuitions is harder to control than philosophers have usually acknowledged. But there is also a deeper problem with them. It is child's play to dream up further such examples to "prove" further conceptual points. Suppose a cow gave birth to something that was atom-for-atom indiscernible from a shark. Would it be a shark? What is the truth-maker for sharkhood? If you posed that question to a biologist, the charitable reaction would be that you were making a labored attempt at a joke. Suppose an evil demon could make water turn solid at room temperature by smiling at it; would demon-water be ice? Too silly a hypothesis to deserve a response. All such intuition pumps depend on the distinction spelled out by McLaughlin and O'Leary-Hawthorne between "conceptual" and "reductive" answers to the big questions. What I hadn't sufficiently appreciated in my earlier forthright response to Jackson is that when one says that the truth-maker question requires a conceptual answer, one means an answer that holds not just in our world, or all nomologically possible worlds, but in all logically possible worlds. Endnote 13 Smiling demons, cow-sharks, Blockheads, and Swampmen are all, some philosophers think, logically possible, even if they are not nomologically possible, and these philosophers think this is important. I do not. Why should the truth-maker question cast its net this wide? Because, I gather, otherwise its answer doesn't tell us about the essence of the topic in question. But who believes in real essences of this sort nowadays? Not I. Consider the fate of "logical behaviorism" with regard to magnets. Here are two candidate answers to the question of what the truth-maker is for magnets: (a) all magnets are things that attract iron, and (b) all magnets are things that have a certain internal structure (call it M-alignment). Was the old, behavioral criterion (a) eventually superseded by the new, internal structure criterion (b), or did the latter merely reductively explain the former? To find out, we must imagine posing scientists the following Swampman-style questions. Suppose you discovered a thing that attracted iron but was not M-aligned (like standard magnets). Would you call it a magnet? Or: Suppose you discovered a thing that was M-aligned but did not attract iron. Would you call it a magnet? The physicists would reply that if they were confronted with either of these imaginary objects, they would have much more important things to worry about than what to call them (Dennett, 1968, p234). Their whole scientific picture depends on there being a deep regularity between the alignment of atomic dipoles in magnetic domains and iron-attraction, and the "fact" that it is logically possible to break this regularity is of vanishing interest to them. If they are "logical behaviorists" about magnets, this is no doubt due to William Gilbert's early phenomenological work in the 17th century, which established the historical priority, if nothing else, for the classification of magnets by what they do, not what they have inside. (He built upon, and improved, the folk physics of magnets, in short.) What is of interest, however, is the real covariance of "structural" and "behavioral" factors--and if they find violations of the regularities, they adjust their science accordingly, letting the terms fall where they may. Nominal essences are all the essences that science needs, and some are better than others, because they capture more regularity in nature. In "Do Animals have Beliefs?" (forthcoming), I say, commenting on a point of agreement between Fodor and me: We both agree that a brain filled with sawdust or jello could not sustain beliefs. There has to be structure; there have to be elements of plasticity that can go into different states and thereby secure one revision or another of the contents of the agent's beliefs. (p.116) Doesn't this passage concede everything McLaughlin and O'Leary-Hawthorne have been pressing on me? When I say "could not" and "have to," am I speaking of "conceptual" or "nomological" necessities? I am speaking of serious necessities. If I ever encounter a plausible believer-candidate that violates them, what to call it will be the least of my worries, since my whole theory of mind will be sunk. So why do I lean towards "logical behaviorism" and away from the specifics of internal activity and structure that McLaughlin and O'Leary-Hawthorne go to such lengths to highlight? For the reasons that Lynne Rudder Baker explains so well in her essay. Like Gilbert, I start with folk theory, which is remarkably robust in the case of folk psychology. It is a discovered fact, already well confirmed, that "peripheral narrow behavior" of the sorts commonly observed by everyday folk, is readily predicted and explained by folk psychology. Thus the order of explanation is from outer to inner, not vice versa. We want a theory of the innards that can account for all that regularity. It might have gone otherwise; it is logically possible, I suppose, that we could have found "belief-boxes" in people's heads that causally explained their behavior, and well-nigh identical "belief-boxes" in the cores of redwood trees that were entirely inert. We would then have put a premium on explaining that regularity of internal structure, and let the differences in behavioral consequences tag along behind. But we didn't find any such thing. It is not just logically possible but already demonstrated that there are in fact many internally different ways of skinning the behavioral cat, while it is at best logically possible, and Vanishingly (Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 1995, p.109) unlikely, that we will ever encounter Manthra, or anything else that is an internal twin lacking the behavioral prowess. Endnote 14 This all depends, of course, on how closely we look at the innards for signs of similarity. How different do internal ways have to be to count as different? McLaughlin and O'Leary-Hawthorne see a contradiction between my various positions on behaviorism, and I guess they are right. I should have explained why I thought that the difference between molecular and molar behaviorism didn't amount to anything important, rather than burking the distinction altogether. Of all the molecular differences that there might be, the only ones that would make a difference to psychology (as ordinarily understood) would be those that made a difference to the "peripheral narrow behavior" that is predicted and explained by folk psychology. Consider: Tweedledum and Tweedledee both hear a joke and both laugh; both also would laugh at various other jokes, would find others unfunny, etc. Nevertheless their overall joke-getting machinery has some differences--differences that would never show up in any peripheral behavior. These differences are clearly (I would think) below the level of psychology. In particular, these differences would not license a different attribution of belief. Start with what is probably a safe limiting case. Tweedledum's brain makes somewhat different use of potassium in its regulation of axonal transmission than Tweedledee's brain does. Otherwise, their brains always "do the same thing"--they are not quite molecular behavioral twins, but pretty close. Though not molecular behavioral twins, they are nevertheless psychological twins, for the differences are just too fine-grained to show up in interesting psychological differences--such as different belief-attributions on anybody's story of belief attributions. Suppose next a much larger-scale difference: Tweedledum and Tweedledee have entirely different subcognitive systems of face-recognition; one relies on a sort of feature-detection checklist, and the other on some global, holistic constraint-satisfaction scheme (Brainstorms, 1978, pp23-28). Now, we may suppose, they do exhibit different psychological profiles (at least in relatively abnormal circumstances): under experimental conditions, one can readily recognize faces that the other cannot, and hence they will not share just the same beliefs. If, contrary to plausibility, their radically different "face-recognition modules" had exactly the same competence under all experimental conditions, we would see the difference as an interesting physiological difference, but too fine-grained to "count" as psychology. But where we draw the line is not a big deal, one way or the other. Some philosophers may still think that in spite of all this, Blockheads illustrate an important principle, so before taking my leave of Blockheads I cannot resist pointing out that the "principle" relied upon by Block in his original thought experiment is mistaken in any case. One of the most intelligent things any thinking agent can do is plan ahead, engaging in what we might call temporally distal self-control. Anticipating that when push comes to shove at some later time, it may be difficult or impossible to Do the Right Thing--to figure out and execute the rationally optimal response to current circumstances--the wise agent arranges to tie his hands a little, and cede temporally local control to a policy figured out long ago, in cool, dilatory reflections "off line". Dieters, knowing their urges, arrange to locate themselves in places bereft of snacks, and when they later act in an environment that does not include "shall I have a snack?" as a live option, this is a feature of the environment for which they themselves are responsible, as a result of their own earlier intentional actions, not a mere external constraint on performance. The practical navigator, John Stuart Mill reminds us (in Utilitarianism), goes to sea with the hard problems of spherical trigonometry and celestial motion pre-computed, their answers neatly stored in a rather large (but portable) lookup table. It is thus no sign of mindlessness, but rather of foresight, if we encounter the navigator mechanically determining his position by looking up the answers, swiftly, in a book. We think of Oscar Wilde as a great wit. It would no doubt diminish his reputation considerably if we learned that he lay awake most nights for hours, obsessively musing "Now what would I reply if somebody asked me. . . , and what might my pithy opinion be of . . . . ?" Suppose we learned that he patiently worked out, and polished, several dozen bon mots per night, ingeniously indexing them in his memory, all freshly canned and, if the occasion should arise, ready to unleash without skipping a beat--for brevity is indeed the soul of wit. They would still be his bon mots, and their funniness would depend, as the Polish comedian said, on timing. Timing is important for almost any intelligent act--which is why it is intelligent to anticipate and pre-solve problems wherever possible. Wilde's brute force witticism-production scheme might disappoint us, but in fact it draws attention to the fact that all intelligent response depends on costly "R and D", and it doesn't make much difference how the work is distributed in time so long as the effects are timely. So, contrary to Block's guiding intuition, discovering that some Turing Test contestant was (one way or another) looking up the responses in a giant lookup table should not at all rule out the hypothesis that this was the manifestation of an intelligent agent at work. Local inspection would perhaps often leave us in doubt about who the intelligent agent was (or who they were), but we should have no doubt at all that the witticisms on the transcripts were the product of intelligent design, responsive to the meaning of the inputs, and just temporally removed by being solved in the hypothetical. Intelligent design is the only way witticisms can be made. Am I saying it is actually logically necessary that any such giant lookup table of clever responses would have such an etiological history? Heavens no. A cow-shark could give birth to one. But in our world, the only way anything will ever pass the Turing Test is by being an intelligent, thinking agent. Mark Richard provides a close encounter that is long overdue, confronting my "pretty pernicious instrumentalism" with a relentless challenge from one of those who think that the way to make a proper theory of belief is to construct and defend formal definitions of its terms. I turned my back on the efforts of the Content Mafia (otherwise known as the Propositional Attitude Task Force) in 1982, after publishing "Beyond Belief," in which I gave my reasons for rejecting their methodology and enabling assumptions. The tradition has continued in force without my blessing, of course, and few participants have felt the need either to respond to my criticisms, or to show how their way of philosophizing shows what is wrong with mine, so it is high time to see how the scales balance today. Richard offers a three-pronged attack on my account of believers as intentional systems: I cannot solve the lectern problem, he claims, and two avenues which might seem to offer escape hatches for me, Stich's attempt to distinguish beliefs from sub-doxastic states via a condition of "inferential promiscuity," and Evans' Generality Constraint, turn out to be flawed. If, as Richard notes, I can't adequately answer the question "What isn't a belief?" I can't answer the question "What is a belief?" either. Not a good verdict for a theory of belief. I claim to solve the lectern problem, as Richard observes, by showing how, when predicting lectern "behavior," the intentional stance gives a predictor no purchase over using the physical stance. "That no single event is unpredictable from the Laplacean perspective does not imply that every behavioral pattern is perceptible from the perspective," Richard notes, but he then tries to shoehorn my position into the assertion that such behavioral patterns can be identified with the "instantiation of a ceteris paribus law of property instantiation by an individual" [p.12]. No, the impressive patterns cannot be reported in single generalizations of the sort Richard illustrates; the patterns that inspire adoption of the intentional stance consist in the success (with n% noise) of a myriad of such ceteris paribus generalizations. No one predictive success counts for much at all--witness the lectern's readily predicted null behavior. The predictive power of the intentional stance does not derive from our having induced kazillions of psychological "laws" which we are reminded of whenever we see their antecedent conditions being satisfied. Where would all these "laws" come from? We surely aren't taught them by the score. Rather, we effortlessly generate our predictions from an appreciation of the underlying normative principle of intentional stance prediction--rationality. What we need the strategy to explain is our power to generate these predictions--describe these patterns--ad lib and ad hoc in any number we wish, and find the vast majority of them to be predictive way better than chance. That's why I spoke of intentional systems whose behavior is "voluminously" predictable, a theme Richard notes in passing, but underestimates. Richard then goes on to interpret my claim about the ineliminability of the intentional characterization of people (and other true believers) as the claim that the presumptive intentional laws governing lecterns, unlike the intentional laws governing believers, have equally predictive--indeed coextensive--"physical equivalents," and hence are eliminable. This misconstrues my case. I am quite willing to grant that some unimaginably long but finite disjunction of physically characterized conditions exhausts by brute force the entire predictive power of any intentional stance prediction whatsoever. So what? Such claims are not interesting; the same move could be used to strike down every biological category (for instance), since the Heat Death of the Universe, if nothing else, guarantees that "there is" a huge but finite disjunction of predicates constructible by Boolean means from terms drawn strictly from sub-atomic physics that would be exactly as predictive as "is a herbivore" or "is hemoglobin" or "reproduces asexually." And yet the patterns referred to by these biological terms are perfectly real. The guaranteed existence of such an unwieldy predicate doesn't diminish the actual value, for purposes of prediction, of an intentionalistic predication, and it doesn't explain what an intentionalistic claim explains. I have improved on my Martian predictor example in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, pp.412-19, in the riddle of the two black boxes. I show that there are short, readily tested causal generalizations whose almost exceptionless truth would be manifest to super-Laplaceans but utterly mysterious and inexplicable by them unless they adopted the intentional stance. The fact that the super-Laplaceans could predict each instance of the generalization--could generate, given enough time, every disjunct in the unimaginably long list--would not impress them, since they would see clear as day in the totality of their predictions a simple regularity that they could not explain. Why does Richard go to such pains to translate my thesis into the alien language of "ceteris paribus laws" and then interpret its central claim in terms of the non-existence of equivalent sentences composed in non-intentional vocabulary? The reason, I think, is methodological: Richard simply cannot use the tools of his trade unless he can first turn the object of scrutiny into such a claim. This methodological imperative comes out more sharply when we turn to his painstakingly constructed arguments against Stich's distinction, and Evans' Generality Constraint. Here he helps himself on several occasions to the tempting surmise that there is a language of thought, even though he concedes that this hypothesis may not, in the end, make much sense when applied to human believers. Why does he do this? Because he cannot construct his arguments without it. He is not alone, but his forthrightness on this occasion helps to underscore a point I have made in the past: all the fine arguments spun from the intricate examples posed by the Propositional Attitude Task Force depend on isolating rather special cases of what I have called opinions--linguistically infected states quite distinct from beliefs--and showing how, if these presumably clearly identified propositional attitudes are held constant in imagination, troubles can be raised. Without the language of thought as a crutch to keep the "fatal" examples from toppling over under the weight of their often bizarrely topheavy loads of specific content, there would be no research program here at all. Endnote 15 Even if our thought is not invariably realized in a linguistic medium, the existence of something whose thought was invariably so realized, and in whom we would identify the possession of concepts with lexical mastery, isn't impossible. [p36-7]. Or, rather, such a being better not be impossible, since a cottage industry of philosophical research depends on it. Part of my evidence for this claim is the studied indifference of these philosophers, almost without exception, to the efforts by various researchers in Artificial Intelligence and cognitive psychology, to construct and defend models of belief that do utilize something like a language of thought. Is Douglas Lenat's CYC project the sort of entity Richard has in mind? It is a "belief box" containing millions of hand-coded propositions, and insofar as it has any concepts at all, it is in virtue of the "lexical mastery" provisioned by all those carefully wrought definitions, as interanimated by its attached inference engine. Is CYC a believer? The general run of opinion in cognitive science is that CYC is a brave attempt at an impossible project. At the very least, the burden of proof is on those who think that it is possible for something we would recognize as a believer thinker to be composed as Richard assumes. (Of course it is possible to construct large boxes of interanimated sentences--CYC is an actual instance--but few would think that a theory about which sentences appeared where under what conditions in such boxes would be a theory of belief. That is, however, one way of reading the underlying assumption of a language of thought.) Richard appeals at one point to the supposition "I think in English," and at another point tells us of Jane, who believes "Twain's here" expresses a truth, but doesn't realize that Mark Twain is Clemens. Later he alludes to Smith, the poorly integrated bi-lingual, and finally to Jan, the bi-lingual Dutchman. He needs these special cases because he has to be able to point to propositions crisply "identified" as only a specific sentence in a particular language can do (one can speak about sets of possible worlds, but the only practical way of saying which set you have in mind is to go piggyback on a specific sentence). For instance, Jan's belief that lions are in zoos has to be identified with a specific sentence in one of Jan's languages of thought, so it can be clung to, as one of Jan's beliefs, in spite of the evidence that Jan is really a bit dense about lions and zoos, so dense that he can't even "think the thought" in his other language of thought. Richard tells us the point of the exercise: "What Jan provides us with is an example of a believer for whom the Generality Constraint fails." [p.41] The grandfather of all such cases is Kripke's (1979) Pierre, who believes--well, what does he believe about London? While hundreds of pages have been published about Pierre, I have not bothered adding to them, since the proper response seemed to me to be so obvious (Dennett, 1987, p.208n). Thanks to Kripke's clear setting out of the conditions under which Pierre fell into his curiously ill-informed state, we know exactly what his state of mind is. What is the problem, then? The problem is saying, formally and without fear of embarrassing contradiction elsewhere, exactly what Pierre believes. Which propositions, please, should be inscribed on Pierre's belief-list, and how are they to be individuated? Well, it can't be done. That's the point of the Pierre case; it neatly straddles the fence, showing how the normally quite well-behaved conditions on belief pull against each other in abnormal circumstances. What should one do in such a dire circumstance? Chuckle and shrug, and say, "Well, what did you expect? Perfection? Pierre is an imperfect believer, as we all are." How can I say we know exactly what Pierre's state of mind is while cheerfully admitting that we cannot say, exactly, what his state of mind is in terms of propositional attitudes? Simple: propositional-attitude talk is a hugely idealized oversimplification of the messy realities of psychology. Whenever push comes to shove in borderline cases, its demands become unanswerable. That is my pretty pernicious instrumentalism showing, I guess. I don't call my view instrumentalism anymore, but whatever it should be called, my view is that propositional attitude claims are so idealized that it is often impossible to say which approximation, if any, to use. There is nothing unprecedented about this: biologists shrug when asked whether herring-gulls and lesser black-backed gulls are truly different species (Darwin's Dangerous Idea, p.45), and electrical engineers are unperturbed when you point out that it is quite possible to take a perfectly good FM tuner, and, by making a few minor revisions, turn it into something that is maybe a genuine but lousy FM tuner and maybe not an FM tuner at all. How close to the (ideal) "specs" does something have to be to count as a genuine FM tuner? What if it can receive only one station? What if it tends to receive two stations at a time? What if a cow-shark swallows it, and its stomach acid turns it into a television set? The various predicaments that Richard treats as counterexamples to theories could better be considered to be shortcomings in the particular believers, fallings short from the ideal of inferential promiscuity, or Generality, for instance. (Pierre is a true believer, of course, but a decidedly sub-optimal one. Believers aren't supposed to get themselves into the sort of epistemic pickle Pierre has blundered into.) Since all believers fall short of the ideal, Stich's useful idea about how to tell beliefs from other "subdoxastic states" should be treated as a desideratum of beliefs, not a litmus test. Then we can see a gradation of cases, from truly embedded or encapsulated subdoxastic states to more and more "movable" and inferentially available states. The question of how, in the species and in the individual, this transition to more and more versatile cognitive states occurs is fast becoming a major theoretical issue in cognitive science (see, esp. Clark and Karmiloff-Smith, 1993). It wisely ignores the question of how to define belief formally. If, on the other hand, you insist on setting up a definition of belief as a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, in the fashion that Richard assumes obligatory, you merely guarantee that there are no true believers, not among ordinary mortals. So Richard is mistaken in thinking from the outset that I take on the obligation to offer a "principled account of the distinction between (having) propositional attitudes, as against (having) psychological states which, though they produce and regulate behavior, and can be assigned informational content, are not propositional attitudes." [p.2-3] And hence he is mistaken about the role that either Stich's or Evans' claims might play for me, whatever role they have played in the work of others. I myself have always thought that the Generality Constraint nicely captured the ideal--the same ideal Fodor captures by speaking of belief fixation as "Quinian and isotropic." It is an ideal no believer meets but all--all worthy of the name--approximate. One of the best arguments against CYC-style models of belief could in fact be put thus: Since it is at least very hard (and maybe impossible) for them to meet Evans' Generality Constraint, even in approximation, there must be some other way of organizing the innards of a believer that accounts for the fact that believers are in general quite able to honor that constraint. The trouble with the tools of the trade of the Propositional Attitude Task Force is that they cut too fine! Propositions are abstract objects, and (according to theory) just as distinct and well-behaved as, say, integers. If propositions measure psychological states the way numbers measure physical states (as Paul Churchland (1979) has noted), then the belief that p is not identical to the belief that q if p is not identical to q. But the principles of propositional identity are tied to sentence identity in a language. In theory, of course, proposition identity can be specified in terms of sets of possible worlds, but in practice, the way such a set is referred to is as the set in which a particular (English) sentence is true. In reality, propositions are, for this reason, more like dollars than numbers, and the precision aspired to is an illusory goal (The Intentional Stance, 208). Lynn Rudder Baker gives a wonderful account of the reasons why the patterns discernible from the intentional stance should not be assumed to be repeated, somehow, in the brain. In this regard I especially commend her discussion (fn58) of the bogus question about the location of the money-making. As she says, "Such questions are not serious spurs to inquiry." But other rather similar questions are. It is the confusion of the non-serious ones with the serious ones that causes a lot of the confusion. As Alan Turing noted, in one of his many prophetic asides, I do not wish to give the impression that I think there is no mystery about consciousness. There is, for instance, something of a paradox connected with any attempt to localize it. (1950, p.447) The reality of consciousness does not require its localization in the brain, but it still depends on features of brain activity, and if we ant to confirm or disconfirm hypotheses about specific conscious experiences, what we need to test is the truth of the claims that constitute somebody's heterophenomenology. "It occurred to me that winters in Vermont are long" is not about the weather; and I might be wrong in asserting it. Nothing of the kind may have occurred to me. (Baker's analysis of this case would be much helped by honoring David Rosenthal's distinction between expressing and reporting: in uttering this sentence, I would be expressing a higher order thought about my mental life in reporting a lower order thought--about the weather.) Heterophenomenology exhausts the intentional stance theory of consciousness, but we want more (and so we should). Consider a parallel: there is undoubtedly a real pattern in the tales told (and believed) these days by self-styled victims of satanic ritual abuse, but are any of their beliefs true? We'd like to know. Similarly, there is certainly a real pattern in the tales told (and believed) by subjects about what occurs to them at various times, what they "do" in their minds at various times, and we'd like to know which of these beliefs of theirs are true. That is where "brain-mapping" comes in. Baker sees a deep tension between the intentional stance and this brain-mapping move, mainly because she misinterprets me as thinking the brain-mapping will be a "deeper" theory (in her terms), and thus non-intentional. Not at all. The theory of content I espouse for the whole person I espouse all the way in. The neurobiological theory of content is homuncular functionalism, to dress it in its most vivid metaphorical costume, and hence the very same principles of interpretation are used to endow sub-personal parts with contents as are used to endow whole persons. (David Rosenthal's interpretive "hypothesis" on this score is thus correct. Since he has to work to arrive at this position, and Baker misses it, I cannot have done a proper job of expounding it.) The way in which personal-level attributions of belief and other intentional properties get confirmed (in the crunch) by sub-personal attributions of (non-ordinary) intentional properties is roughly parallel to the way in which one might confirm one's attribution of culpable motives to, say, the British Empire, or the CIA, or IBM, by discovering a pattern of beliefs, desires, intentions, among the agents whose joint activity compose the actions, beliefs and intentions of the super-personal agent (see the discussion of Carol Rovane, at the end of this essay, for more on this). So in the case of Eve, the story goes like this. Eve expresses the higher-order thought "I was suddenly conscious of the fact that I was not alone in the house," thereby reporting (truly or falsely) that she had a certain first-order thought to the effect that she was not alone in the house. Did she? We'll have to look at our record of what went on in her brain at the relevant time. Hmm, sure enough, here's a brain event that had the content (roughly): "Who's there!?!?!" That's close enough. We confirm her report, in this case. But we might not have confirmed it. We might have found circumstantial evidence to the effect that Eve has rationalized the whole event, and wasn't the least bit driven, at the relevant time, by contents concerning the presence of others. Some of this evidence might be our secret videotape of her externally visible behavior at the time. (We see her humming contentedly throughout the relevant period, right up to the time when she answered the phone and began answering our questions about her recent phenomenology. There is no sign of apprehension, no abrupt change of trajectory, and the record of heartrate and skin conductance shows no alarm.) But we might actually get some even better (because closer to the gist of her self-report) evidence from our neurocryptography unit, which, applying the intentional stance to Eve's brain-parts, has tentatively identified a homunculus whose duties include signalling a general fire drill whenever it detects the presence of another--it's hooked up to the vertical symmetry detector in the vision system, for instance (CE, p.179). That's the sort of story I had in mind. And it uses the intentional-stance theory of content all the way in. At one point [p.9], Baker wonders what I would conclude if "the neuroscientist could find no brain state or process with which to identify the putatively conscious belief." And she says either alternative would leave half of my project in the lurch. It's worse than that: paraphrasing the physicists who were confronted with the non-magnet (if that's what it was) I'd have a much worse problem than which half of my project to cling to. I'd be worried that my whole project was on the verge of collapse. But she is right that in this terrible eventuality, I'd cling to the intentional stance aspect (which I know works very well) and do my best to explain why so many people have so many false beliefs about what is going on in their minds. Why would I be so eager to show that people were mistaken in these beliefs? Because my whole worldview resists as an utterly last resort any alternative explanation--e.g., a frankly dualistic explanation--of these undeniably real patterns. To pursue the parallel, suppose we can't confirm any of the peoples' stories about satanic cult abuse. No physical evidence of the events reported can be found. What would we do then? We would try to show that these folks, however sincere in their reports, were just wrong. But if the pattern defied that diagnosis, as it might, in principle, we'd have to start toying with the idea that the satanic ritual abuse happened in another dimension or some other equally extravagant departure from conservative physics and metaphysics. We're talking seriously spooky last resorts, folks! Stephen Webb's dexterous navigation of the shoals of Plan One and the various Passes is largely for nought, since it misconstrues the intentional stance in a different way. It overlooks a key feature of the intentional stance: one is allowed to revise one's attributions in the light of falsified predictions. As soon as one hears the professor's surprising (in the circumstances) words, one revises the attribution: she must not have seen her keys, one easily concludes. So behavioral evidence has all along been front and center in the intentional stance. What is the heterophenomenological method, after all, but an application of this obvious principle? One patiently gathers behavioral evidence (largely but not entirely verbal behavioral evidence), hypothesizing interpretations and refining one's attributions until, in the limit, they account for ("predict," make sense of) all the behavior. The standard limit myth may be invoked: the beliefs and desires (and other intentional states) of an intentional system are those that would be attributed to it by an ideal observer with a God's-eye-point-of-view. Prediction and retrodiction are all one to the intentional stance, which explains as it attributes. It would not be a very useful stance if it couldn't be harnessed reliably for real-time prediction, but after-the-fact explanation of behavior is hardly off limits to it, and the behavior itself is obviously a main source of evidence. Webb patiently tries to corral me at various other choice points, overlooking reasons I have already given for resisting his alternatives. Much of what I have said above in response to McLaughlin and O'Leary-Hawthorne, and Baker, applies here as well. To reiterate: The skin is not that important as a boundary, as Skinner famously conceded (with my concurrence), so "internal" behavior is in principle not off limits to the interpretive exercise, and it can, in particular cases, crucially supplement the stock of relevant data, but it gets interpreted by the same rules as behavior outside the skin: the carton of cigarettes listed on the scrap of paper has the same evidentiary status as the carton of cigarettes referred to by some cerebral shopping list, if and when science can discern it. I have pointed out that the line between the design stance and the intentional stance is not sharp in any case; sub-personal cognitive psychology is a design stance enterprise conducted with the aid of liberal intentional stance characterizations of homunculi. 4. Superficialism vs. Hysterical Realism . [Save the phenomena.] --Plato Save the surface and you save all. --Sherwin-Williams Thus Quine opens his Pursuit of Truth (1990). Georges Rey is surely right that the key to the profound disagreements he and other Fodorians have with me is that I espouse a view he deftly labels "superficialism." Who would ever want to be called a superficialist? Well, Quine, for one, might not shrink from the label. One good term deserves another. In the past I've called Fodor an "industrial strength realist" but the connotations of that term are all too positive, and I think Rey's blithe self-description as a "commonsense" realist is amusingly belied by the convolutions of doctrine he presents to us, so I'll change the epithet. Rey is an advocate of hysterical realism. Now you can choose: which would you rather be, a hysterical realist or a superficialist like me? Rey is far from being alone when he responds to the siren song of hysterical realism. The defense of what Richard Rorty mockingly calls "Our Realist Intuitions" is a fervent activity in many quarters, and while I am not hereby endorsing Rorty's brand of resistance, I do think he has touched one of the untouchable sore spots in contemporary philosophy. Hysterical realism Endnote 16 deserves its name, I will argue, because it is an overreaction, a rationally unmotivatable spasm brought on by peering into the abyss of certain indeterminacies that really should not trouble anybody so much. For Rey the particular topic is consciousness, a contentious topic, but we can begin cautiously. I trust we can all agree on this much: we find people asking questions about consciousness, using ordinary language, of course, with its ordinary presuppositions enshrined. Then once we start examining the real, causal complexities of what happens in brains, we find, I claim, a strikingly poor match between the pre-theoretical presuppositions and the messy details. Here is another place where a disagreement over empirical facts looms large. Those who have not looked very closely are apt to think that I am exaggerating when I claim that this is a serious theoretical impasse. But since this isn't the place to review the empirical details, let's just suppose for the sake of argument that I am not exaggerating. Faced, then, with the striking non-alignment of everyday talk with scientific talk, what, as philosophers, should we do? My view, "superficialism," holds that we should relax our grip on the conviction that our everyday terms must find application--one application or another--in any acceptable solution. There may be, I say, no fact of the matter of just which events are--to use the ordinary term--conscious, and which are not (in the rather special cases raised by the Orwell vs. Stalin impasse). Fie! Scandalous irrealism! Verificationism! Rey exposes my position with thorough scholarship. He relentlessly tracks down virtually all the points of confrontation, and he has organized the whole in proper marching order. Time and again as I read his essay, I found myself thinking "but I've dealt with that" only to turn the page and find the very passage I had in mind duly cited and discussed. There is one exception. To advert to what may be the only relevant passage in my work Rey doesn't discuss, the situation with regard to consciousness is like that confronted by the theorists who are asked what fatigues are (Brainstorms, p.xix-xx). The natives in this imaginary land, you may recall, have a curious doctrine of "fatigues"--too many fatigues spoil your aim, a fatigue in the legs is worth two in the arms, and Mommy, where do fatigues go when I sleep? We modern scientists arrive in their midst and they ask us to solve their traditional mysteries about fatigues. The hysterical realist takes on the thankless task of finding something real in the body to declare to be the fatigues so favored by the local folk. And I say "Gimme a break! We already know enough about fatigues to know that they are not a good category for precision science; you simply cannot motivate a realist theory of fatigues. There's nothing left to discover that could be relevant to what the right theory of fatigues would be." That is superficialism, by definition, but the question remains: Is this in fact a superficial response? Does it fall prey, as Rey suggests, to my own charge of mistaking a failure of imagination for an insight into necessity? I say that we already know enough empirical facts about what consciousness isn't to know that the ordinary concept of consciousness, like the concept of fatigues, is too frail; it could never be turned into the sort of scientific concept that could wring answers to the currently unanswerable questions. On the contrary, says the hysterical realist, we can dimly imagine that science will someday uncover grounds, currently unsuspected or even unimaginable by us, for settling such questions as the Orwell vs. Stalin question, or the question of whether some subset of human beings might turn out to be zombies after all, etc. "Never say never," is the advice offered by Owen Flanagan (1992, p. 14-15). I'm all for open-mindedness and scientific optimism, but surely Rey, Flanagan, and the others would agree that there are some occasions when the jig is up--when it is just silly to hold out hope for such a scientific revelation. Consider Einsteinian physics. Einstein noted that it is impossible to distinguish by local observation between a gravitational field and an accelerated frame of reference. This led him to postulate the equivalence that is at the heart of relativity theory. Now insert the "realist," who says "Oh just because you can't distinguish the two doesn't mean they aren't different! There might be a difference that is indistinguishable by any current test! Never say never!" Yeah, there might be, but in the meantime, tremendous progress is made by concluding that there isn't (Cf. Field, 1974, 1975). I am proposing similar simplifications: since you can't distinguish between the Orwellian and Stalinesque models of meta-contrast, or between a zombie that acts just as if its conscious and a conscious being, they are equivalent. If Rey et al. agree with me that the superficialist response is sometimes appropriate, the question that divides us is whether the empirical facts support consciousness being such an instance. I say yes, and what some philosophers don't appreciate is that when I say this, I'm not just putting forward a philosophical thesis meant to ride piggy-back on whatever the current scientific consensus might be. I'm making a fairly bold proposal about empirical theory in cognitive neuroscience, and basing it on a fairly detailed analysis of a wide variety of experimental and theoretical results. The Multiple Drafts Model is deliberately sketchy about many details, but it is a scientific model, not just a philosophical toy. Rey sketches his alternative, the CCC theory of consciousness, and suggests that in many regards I could go along with his way of speaking--all my multiple drafts being carried along as sentences of LOT in all his registers. And he acknowledges that his theory will have to be--shall we say--innovative in the way it settles many of the issues left open in the traditional understanding. But he imagines that there might be good scientific reasons in favor of such innovations, though of course he can't now say what they might be. This is one place where I think he has clearly underestimated the grounds I have given for my view. It is in the details of the account of the problems about time that the incoherence of Cartesian materialism emerges, and when Rey says that the problems of so-called temporal anomaly can be "easily sorted out" by a three-fold distinction in his CCC theory, his optimism counts for nothing till we see just how this is to be accomplished when he turns his philosophical theory into a scientific theory with some detail. Endnote 17 David Rosenthal takes the first few steps of this project in his own attempt to describe a possible brain mechanism that could resolve the Orwell-Stalin issue, and arrives at the conclusion that his mechanism "blurs the contrast between Stalinesque and Orwellian. . . There is reason, therefore, to be suspicious of a hard and fast distinction between Stalinesque and Orwellian mechanisms." [p.21] (More about this later.) Rey admits he hasn't a clue whether Orwell or Stalin would prevail in his CCC theory, but sees no reason "to leap to the conclusion" that there is no fact of the matter. My claim was no leap; it was brought home by a careful examination of the possibilities. Endnote 18 (This is a good opportunity to point out that Flanagan's discussion similarly underestimates the difficulties raised by the Multiple Drafts Model. He cites (p.15-16) the Logothetis and Schall experiment with macaques, but it is systematically inconclusive: Suppose we find that the activity in the STS region in macaques (parallel to MT in the human cortex) is also found in human subjects who deny awareness of the shift to which the macaques have been trained to respond, while making some other behavioral indication (e.g., a saccade) that they have detected the shift? Would this be evidence showing that MT activity was not, after all, associated with consciousness? Flanagan overlooks my discussion of the issue: There is a region in the cortex called MT, which responds to motion (and apparent motion). Suppose then that some activity in MT is the brain's concluding that there was . . . motion. There is no further question, on the Multiple Drafts model, of whether this is a pre-experiential or post-experiential conclusion. It would be a mistake to ask, in other words, whether the activity in MT was a "reaction to a conscious experience" . . . as opposed to a "decision to represent motion" [in conscious experience]. (CE, p.128n) And it is interesting to note that Logothetis and Schall themselves acknowledge the gap, and do not attempt to close it: The interpretation of the results is by no means conclusive. The differential modulation of these STS neurons in response to rivalrous stimuli was evident much earlier than subjects typically resolve the rivalrous perception. Thus further processing is clearly involved, and the data do not exclude the possibility that the perception-related modulation observed in these neurons may be a result of feedback from higher centers. (Logothetis and Schall, 1989) What would closing the gap entail? It would entail singling out some privileged corner-turning as the one that the conscious subject presided over or witnessed, but there is no such inner sanctum for such events to happen in. Flanagan has jumped to conclusions about the proper heterophenomenology of the macaques and its relation to activity in STS, begging the question. Flanagan also speculates that either 40-herz synchrony or the Squire Zola-Morgan theory of hippocampal involvement might provide the leverage to resolve the quandaries I say are unresolvable, but these two popular themes are already tidily tucked in among the factors that are powerless to settle the questions, as a careful examination shows. (See, for instance, Jeffrey Gray's forthcoming article in BBS, presenting his model of the role of the hippocampus in consciousness, and my commentary, "Overworking the hippocampus.") Until you work through the details, it is indeed hard to see that these ideas utterly fail to provide any further leverage on the Orwell-Stalin question. And if they can't help, what could? It is no use just saying "Well, I can't imagine anything now that could upset your claim, but still, something could!") I think there are abundant empirical grounds for eschewing Rey's proposed way of speaking about "registers" in the brain containing various sentences in a language of thought, but I'll go along with the gag this far: if Rey could motivate a categorization of all these registers into c-registers and u-registers, I would grant that he could thereupon handily discover, by brute inspection, facts of the matter where I say there are none. Some of these might turn out to be mighty strange facts--it could turn out that lefthanders aren't conscious after all, or that the order in which successive perceived events become conscious in subjects is seldom if ever the order in which they seem to subjects to occur, or that people are conscious of multiple interpretations of every sentence they hear, without realizing it--but who ever said science couldn't surprise us? But precisely because such bizarre "discoveries" are not just possible but already upon us, the demand for a motivation for the proposed identifications is going to be very, very high. We already know that the tasks that would have to be normally accomplished by the imagined c-registers are broken up and distributed around to many different structures, asynchronously making their particular contributions. Singling out any one variety of these, or even some salient team of these, and labeling them the c-registers is going to look awfully ad hoc. Superficialism is attractive whenever the task of motivating a particular hard line looks hopeless. Hilary Putnam's classic paper, "Dreaming and Depth Grammar" 1962, did a number on superficialism from which it has never, till now, recovered. Norman Malcolm and the other mavens of ordinary language philosophy had raised their brand of "conceptual analysis" to a deeply regressive, hyperconservative, pitch. Science, it seemed, could never discover anything that the Folk didn't already know about their phenomena. If science discovered anything truly surprising, it would have to be about something else--"you've changed the concept," as the saying went. Putnam showed how lamentably thin this philosophy of language was (see also Dennett, 1968), but I think the pendulum has swung too far. Used in moderation, the superficialist response to mismatches between folk psychology and academic psychology (like the mismatch between folk physiology --"fatigues"--and scientific physiology) is just the ticket. Ordinary folk think that dreams are experiences that occur during sleep. Suppose science were to discover that the content-fixing series of neural events that generate the stories people tell on waking actually occur, unbeknownst to their subjects, during waking life. At this very minute, let's suppose, your brain is composing ("having"?) the dream you will report on waking tomorrow. Now in this imagined eventuality, "what would we say?" Would we say "It turns out that dreams aren't experiences after all" or would we say "It turns out that there aren't any dreams at all" or what? The superficialist about dreams says that this may be an interesting question but it is not a question of discovery, but one of policy, just like the fatigues case--or the magnets case. The hysterical realist says that it all depends on what the scientists have learned. If there is a deep enough theory (we can't imagine it now, of course), there could be conclusive grounds for the claim that scientists had discovered that dreams happen while you're awake, and are not experiences at all. But, says Malcolm, rising from the grave, now you're just changing the concept. You have discovered a scientific truth, but not a truth about dreams. The concept of a dream may not be a good scientific concept, but it is our very own. He would say the same about the alternative claim--the scientists had discovered that there simply were no dreams after all. Eliminativism about dreams is as myopic and needlessly tendentious as proclaiming the weird identification. The main point, in any event, is that if dreams (as ordinarily understood) turned out not to have a good fit with scientific discoveries, then it would be a gratuitous exercise in special pleading to try to force one scientific identification of dreams or another; whatever we decided was best to say, our decision would not be a scientific discovery, but a more or less political decision about how best to avoid misunderstandings. It must count against any novel scientific recategorization of an ordinary term that it creates huge dislocations of common understanding (dolphins turn out not to be fish, but when we are told that tomatoes are fruit, not vegetables, we blithely conclude that scientists have some other, technical concept of fruit in mind, not the ordinary one). That's just a point about language--a close kin to Quine on the constraints on radical translation, and also, as Rey notes, to Malcolm and Wittgenstein on "changing the concept." Endnote 19 Putnam is commonly thought to have put a stop to this line of thought, not just in his trouncing of Malcolm, but in his more recent insistence (1975) that, thanks to the division of linguistic labor, natural kinds can be what people are really talking about, even when, as individuals, they are incompetent to discriminate between alternative possibilities. The fundamental idea is that we can escape our local epistemological limitations by ceding our referential authority to Nature itself: What I mean (whether I know it or not) by my own word "water" is whatever natural kind the stuff I paradigmatically call "water" turns out to be. This is a fine idea when Nature cooperates--or rather, to put the responsibility where it belongs, when our linguistic community happens to have hit the nail on the head (or close enough). But whenever our everyday terms carve Nature less well (in spite of our Putnamian goal of naming natural kinds) there is no forcing the issue. It is thus the over-extension of Putnam's doctrine of natural kinds that is a bulwark of hysterical realism, an attempt to turn the nominal essences of science into real essences (Dennett, 1995). This comes out clearly if we contrast a case in which Putnam's doctrine looks plausible with one that does not look compelling at all. Suppose Twin Earth is just like Earth except for having shmust where we have dust--behind the books on the bookcase, along country roads during dry spells, etc. But surely, you protest, the concept of dust isn't the concept of a natural kind--shmust is dust, in spite of what anybody says! Exactly. It's a superficial concept, a nominal essence of scant interest or power. We already know enough about dust to know that science couldn't discover that dust was really something else--or that there wasn't any dust. Science could not uncover the secret nature of dust, because dust qua dust couldn't have a secret nature. In contrast, we already know enough about water, and gold, to know that they are natural kinds. The question then that divides Rey and me might seem to be: are the concepts of folk psychology like the concept of dust, or like the concept of water? Rey thinks they are like the concept of water, good candidates for natural kindhood. I think we already know enough about many of them to know that even though they may aspire to name natural kinds (unlike the concept of dust), they aren't good enough to succeed. That is a difference of opinion arising from different readings of the empirical facts, but there is also an underlying philosophical disagreement. Rey, as a hysterical realist, thinks there is always the further question to be answered: which natural kinds do our terms in fact name? This question cannot be forced, since natural kinds can be nested, an undeniable fact (though Putnamians have ignored it for years) that leads us right back to superficialism. Consider Putnam's standard case of water. Presumably, H2O and XYZ are subkinds of some larger natural kind. Putnam disguises this implication by calling his alternative "XYZ" and not, say, "X2O," which we would be more inclined to consider a novel variety of water, like D20, deuterium oxide or heavy water. Endnote 20 How could H20 and XYZ not be instances of some single natural kind, given that they are as interchangeable in the physical world as Putnam requires us to imagine? Suppose, then, that H20 and XYZ are both instances of some broader natural kind, K. Which natural kind did the folk mean by their pre-scientific word "water"? Since they lacked any scientific purchase on the difference between H20 and K, and could not, ex hypothesi, distinguish them, there cannot have been grounds in their usage or understanding for favoring one over the other. Might we invoke a "general principle" to the effect that whenever people use a term with the understanding that it names a natural kind, they mean the term to refer to the narrowest natural kind that fits their historical usage? We might, but the arbitrariness of the principle will haunt us in cases in which isolation forces bizarrely narrow answers. Endnote 21 For instance, if there is life anywhere in the universe that is not carbon-based, such life forms could not be called "alive" by unscientific earthlings, since the only life forms that have ever been called alive on this planet are exclusively carbon-based, and carbon-based life is surely a natural kind. Adopting the proposed repair to Putnamian doctrine, we would have to say that anyone who called a Martian alive would be making the same mistake as the person who called a glass of XYZ water. Not very persuasive. So if we abandon the minimalist principle as arbitrary and unmotivatable, we are left with two choices: either there is a fact of the matter, but one that is systematically indiscernible from every possible perspective (now that's truly hysterical realism!), or there is no fact of the matter--it's a policy question at best--and we are back at superficialism. Try it. You'll like it. I find it a lot easier to swallow than hysterical realism. 5. Otto and the Zombies As Joseph Levine says, "it's terribly difficult to get clear about just what is being affirmed and denied" in the qualia debate. His response is to meet my case against qualia with a methodical, sympathetic and accurate rebuttal, very usefully shining light on the issues from the other side. It might seem at first as if his botanizing of species of bold and modest qualophilia, reductionism and eliminativism is an indictment of the whole enterprise, showing it to be one more instance of philosophers playing burden tennis instead of engaging in a serious investigation. His use of the common philosophical diction of "available strategies" belies the fact that for him, as for me, the point in the end isn't to win, but to uncover the truth. Let me try to reframe the issue slightly. We begin as people with opposing hunches--it's as simple as that--and neither side knows just what to say. One side feels pretty uncomfortable with the prospect of a materialistic account of subjectivity, and the other side is pretty sure all the real problems with such a theory can be worked out. So they put their heads together (face to face and opposed), and see what happens. Strong moves by one side (e.g., "bold qualophilia") are readily rebuffed--not refuted once and for all, but made to seem gratuitous or extravagant, worth putting on the back burner for awhile if not abandoned utterly--while more modest forays are explored. Out of this actually quite constructive interplay of opposing hunches, genuine progress is made, or can be made. It is important to recognize this interplay or dialectic, for otherwise it can seem as if people are always talking past each other--or worse: deliberately attempting to confound the opposition. Robert Van Gulick, for instance, describes my method in the following terms: "like any good debater, he tries to saddle the opposition with as much questionable philosophical baggage as possible." [ms p6] That would not be a constructive move on my part, and I sincerely hope I haven't done that. Let's leave debating tricks to the debaters. What I have tried to do is to show that the "questionable philosophical baggage" comes along for the ride under surprisingly innocent-seeming circumstances. I can see how my arguing that somebody's apparently innocent "realism" or "mild qualophilia" had embarrassing implications might look like a debater's trick to somebody on the receiving end, but if that were all it was, it should not be admired or even tolerated; it should be dismissed as unhelpful and unserious shenanigans. It has seemed to some as if I am shooting down strawmen with arguments against (only) bold qualophilia, when in fact I aim some arguments--appropriately--against the bold views and others--appropriately--against the modest views. This comes out clearly in Levine's deft peeling of the onion, as he follows me down the path to what he considers Otto's "trap," acknowledging--and explaining--how each move on his side is neatly countered by a move on my part. I will return to Otto, and Levine's attempt to escape with an intact view, in a moment, but first I want to highlight a feature of the interplay that comes out intermittently in Levine's discussion, but to which he does not draw explicit attention. This is what we might call unrecognized allegiances. In this phenomenon, people on one side or the other explicitly disavow any allegiance to a strong view as soon as a good objection to it is pressed, thereby allowing themselves to concede without further examination that the other side's arguments would indeed demolish that strawman, but precisely because they never bother to defend the strong view, they fail to see just how much they are giving up--and giving up for good--as they move to the more modest and defensible versions. Then they later unwittingly revert to an appeal to some feature that belongs only to the strong view, and we go round and round in circles. I believe this problem of unrecognized allegiances is a common foible, and one of my countermeasures is to set up vivid reminders of what one is renouncing--never to return. Figment, for instance. It is an attractive feature to qualophiles until I find a suitably abusive way of characterizing it, and I am always gratified when some brave qualophile admits that, yes, something along the lines of figment as just what she was hankering for. Well, you can't have it. Figment doesn't properly come up, of course, in discussions with modest qualophiles, who have officially renounced such extravagances, but without the frontal attack on it, it would, I am sure, continue to fuel the motivation of some modest qualophiles behind the scenes. On his journey to Otto, Levine acutely describes the challenge of heterophenomenology, and sees that the only escape for qualophiles is to maintain "that conscious experiences themselves, not merely our verbal judgments about them, are the primary data to which a theory must answer." [p.15] Leopold Stubenberg (1995) has seen the same cliff-edge looming, and resisted in the same terms. Here is my response (and note that its force is somewhat acknowledged, at various points, in Levine's discussion): You defenders of the first-person point of view are not entitled to this complaint about the "primary data" of heterophenomenology, since by your own lights, you should prefer its treatment of the primary data to any other. Why? Because it manifestly does justice to both possible sources of non-overlap. On the one hand, if some of your conscious experiences occur unbeknownst to you (they are experiences about which you have no beliefs, and hence can make no "verbal judgments"), then they are just as inaccessible to your first-person point of view as they are to heterophenomenology. Ex hypothesi, you don't even suspect you have them--if you did, you could verbally express those suspicions. So heterophenomenology's list of primary data doesn't leave out any conscious experiences you know of, or have any first-person inklings about. On the other hand, unless you claim not just reliability or normal incorrigibility, but outright infallibility, you should admit that some--just some--of your beliefs (or verbal judgments) about your conscious experiences might be wrong; in all such cases, however rare they are, what has to be explained by theory is not the conscious experience, but your belief in it (or your sincere verbal judgment, etc). So heterophenomenology doesn't include any spurious "primary data" either, but plays it safe in a way you should approve. Endnote 22 Levine's response to this impasse, like Stubenberg's, takes us right to Otto, who anticipates it, in his plea for "real seeming". And Levine notes, correctly I daresay, that if I am right when I say "there is no difference between being of the heartfelt opinion that something seems pink to you, and something really seeming pink to you," then there is "nothing left about which to argue." So we are closing in. (For more on real seeming, see below.) And it is true, as Levine says, that in my immediate response to Otto, I don't really argue for this claim; I just assert it. Elsewhere in the book, however, I do give grounds for believing it--in my own account of what consciousness comes to, and in my arguments about what no empirically realistic model of consciousness can tolerate: a Cartesian Theater. But I surely didn't make it clear enough why those considerations guaranteed my assertion to Otto on this occasion. Thanks to Levine, I can now repair that gap, for the issue is exposed with unprecedented clarity in his attempt to characterize the modest qualophile's "inability to provide an account of the mechanisms of first-person epistemic access." [p27] So suppose B is a state of conscious experience. I want to understand how a cognitive state, A, carries the information that B. It seems that in order for me to understand that relation, I must first understand how B is realized in those very physical mechanisms by which the information that B is to be carried to A. But, by the qualophile's own hypothesis, this understanding is not currently available. That is, I don't understand how B is itself realized in physical mechanisms. So, it follows that I also don't understand how information concerning B flows to A [my emphasis]. Hence, I don't have an account of first-person epistemic access. [p.28-9] Think of what lurks in this "flowing to A." There is a (functional) place, A, which either "has access to" the information that B, or doesn't. How on earth does the information get there? These are the terms in which Levine's qualophile frames the issue. But since this is to be an account of first-person epistemic access, the place in question must be none other than the place where I reside, the Cartesian Theater. There is no such place. Any theory which postulates such a place is still in the grip of Cartesian materialism. What (and where) is this I? It is not an organ, a subfaculty, a place in the brain, a medium--or medium (Dennett, 1993)--into which information gets transduced. My attack on the Cartesian Theater is among other things an attack on the very practice--illustrated here in an otherwise remarkably surefooted performance--of positing an unanalyzed "I" or "we" or "self" or "subject" who "has access" to x or y, as if we could take this as a primitive of our theorizing. Any sane account of the mechanisms of consciousness must begin with the denial of Cartesian materialism; and that leads irresistibly to the view that the "me" has to be constructed out of the interactions, not vice versa. This is the point of what I sometimes think is the most important, and under-appreciated, passage in CE: How do I get to know all about this? How come I can tell you all about what was going on in my head? The answer to the puzzle is simple: Because that is what I am. Because a knower and reporter of such things in such terms is what is me. My existence is explained by the fact that there are these capacities in this body. (p410) But then what about the zombie problem? Levine is excellent on the zombie problem. In particular, he shows exactly why, as I have urged, there is really nothing left of modest qualophilia unless you hang tough on the conceivability of zombies. So, hanging tough on zombies is just what he does, with resourcefulness and an acute appreciation of the pitfalls the qualophobe has prepared for him. I hope no qualophiles find fault with his treatment, since he seems to me to have captured the dialectic and strategy of both sides just about perfectly. Certainly he has done justice to my campaign against zombies--except for one delicate matter, alluded to in his polemical closing, but not directly addressed. Levine deplores the defensive position into which qualophiles have been thrust by my attack on their belief in zombies. No, he says, truly modest qualophilia is not "a philosophically infantile obsession" and modest qualophiles "practice their puzzlement in a spirit of profound respect for science." I gather, in other words, that he finds my ridiculing of the belief in zombies to be unfair, at best a cheap shot. I confess that try as I might, I cannot summon up conviction for any other verdict: zombies are ridiculous! By my lights, it is an embarrassment to philosophy that what is widely regarded among philosophers as a major theoretical controversy should come down to whether or not zombies (philosophers' zombies) are possible conceivable. I myself try hard to avoid the issue, and the term, in discussions of consciousness with scientists, since I invariably find that any attempt at serious discussion of the zombie problem meets with ill-suppressed hilarity. This does philosophy and philosophers no good, and I deplore it just as much as Levine does. Clearly a massive public relations job needs to be done, and just as clearly I am not the one to attempt it, since I myself don't yet see how a philosopher as acute and surefooted and wise as Levine can stomach the position he staunchly maintains about zombies. I have helped drive him there, thinking the campaign would cure him. If he chooses instead to outsmart Endnote 23 me, then perhaps he himself should take on the delicate task of explaining to a general audience, not to philosophers, why the belief in zombies is not a reductio ad absurdum. His paper in this volume is a fine foundation, but it is still manifestly written for a philosophical audience, and even in it, he fails (in my biased opinion) to secure much of a leg for a zombie to stand on. But on the strength of his showing here, he can do it if anybody can. I responded above to Robert Van Gulick's suggestion that I was cleverly trying "to saddle the opposition with as much questionable philosophical baggage as possible," by denying that this was a debater's trick on my part. Now it is time to address the substantive issue: can one be a phenomenal realist (in Van Gulick's sense) without taking on the bad baggage? I have said no, but he is not convinced. His paper usefully clarifies the conditions under which one can be a phenomenal realist, in his sense, but in the process it seems to me that he ends up with a position that is scarcely distinguishable from mine after all. He thinks, for instance, that Marcel Kinsbourne's "integrated field" theory might be a good empirical fleshing out of his phenomenal realism, but Kinsbourne's theory and mine are one and the same; we worked it out in collaboration, and so far as I know we do not part company--except by inadvertence or forgetfulness--on any of the issues, differing only in which aspects of the shared theory to emphasize at various moments. What keeps Kinsbourne and me from being phenomenal realists too, then? Phenomenal realists believe there are important structural and functional differences between mental states with phenomenal properties and those without. . . . Phenomenal states for example seem to play an especially privileged role in the initiation of intentional behavior . . . On the structural side phenomenal states typically involve highly integrated representations that incorporate multi-modal information and rich network[s?-editor check ms] of connections among interrelated items in the represented scene or situation. [p.17] Kinsbourne and I certainly agree about the importance to consciousness of these "structural and functional differences," which is why they each get special treatment in the Multiple Drafts Model (e.g., the discussions of blindsight, "hide the thimble," and prosthetic vision in CE). But what work are "phenomenal properties" doing over and above the role played by the integration and the rich network? Kinsbourne and I wonder what we can be supposed to be leaving out. We insist upon the functional and structural differences, and on their importance. I go on to say, wearing my philosopher's hat, that these features are the very features typically misdescribed by philosophers as somehow "phenomenal." What difference are we disagreeing about? Perhaps this one (leaning on the usual crutch): Kinsbourne and I would see no reason in principle why a robot (like the proverbial zombie that lacks phenomenal consciousness) could not exhibit both sides of the distinctions observable in blindsight--being unable to initiate or guide intentional actions by benefiting from the information in its scotoma, while showing the normal responsiveness, etc., to the visual information gleaned from the rest of its visual field. If so, then the difference could not, ex hypothesi, be a difference in phenomenal consciousness, the robot having none under the best of conditions. Would phenomenal realists dig in their heels here, and if so, how? Would they insist that no robot could have highly integrated, action-initiating vision? A daring and implausible empirical claim. Would they insist that any robot that did exhibit normal visual competence would show ipso facto that robots have phenomenal consciousness after all? That would be a clarification or revision of the meaning of "phenomenal consciousness" that would put Kinsbourne and me squarely in the camp of the phenomenal realists (see my discussion of Cog, in the first section of this essay). A third possibility is that the phenomenal realist would declare that in the case of such a robot, we wouldn't know (from all we've been told so far) whether this robot had, or didn't have, phenomenal consciousness to go along with its (otherwise) normal vision. But then what has happened to the importance of phenomenal properties? What leg would they then stand on? There is one window through which the presumed difference can be clearly seen. Van Gulick thinks he has shown that . . . there can be facts of the matter about experience that cannot be empirically detected. There may be a briefly transient fact about how experience is for the subject, but if the duration of that experience is insufficient to fix a belief or generate a report it will systematically elude detection.[ms p16] Kinsbourne and I opened our joint paper by quoting a sentence from Ariel Dorfman's novel, Mascara, that was supposed to exhibit the dubiousness of this assumption: I'm really not sure if others fail to perceive me or if, one fraction of a second after my face interferes with their horizon, a millionth of a second after they have cast their gaze on me, they already begin to wash me from their memory: forgotten before arriving at the scant, sad archangel of a remembrance. In my discussion of Rosenthal and Block, below, I will respond further to his claim. 6. Higher Order Thoughts and Mental Blocks David Rosenthal and Ned Block are both unpersuaded by the radical implications of my Multiple Drafts Model of consciousness, and their essays deal with many of the same issues, but they take opposite approaches to the task confronting them. Rosenthal looks closely at the MDM and attempts to show how to sever its connections to its most disturbing feature, "first-person operationalism" (FPO), in the process very usefully highlighting the reasons I have found for uniting them. Block, in contrast, turns his back on the details of the MDM, thereby confirming the folk wisdom that if you don't look at something, you can't see it. Rosenthal, like Dretske, tries to establish something like a medium of representation (of "sensory content") midway between stimulation and the sort of (mis-)taking that is constitutive of how it seems (in at least one sense). They are both trying to find a home for what I call real seeming, in short. And once again, Rosenthal directly confronts a problem that is being underestimated by others. In his discussion of "Hide the Thimble," he notes that there is a prima facie problem with any view that insists, contrary to Betsy's first-person disavowals, that a "sensation" of the thimble is somehow part of her consciousness. As he observes, "such a sensation could, it seems, be conscious only in some technical sense that lacks any implications about our intuitive conception of consciousness." 13. But he also notes that "Theories often expand our ability to discriminate among phenomena that we cannot discriminate by other means," [p.11] echoing the positive thinking of Owen Flanagan and Georges Rey. True, but as I have stressed in my discussion of them, we have to be able to motivate the extension of the theory. Rosenthal recognizes this burden, and claims that the apparent adhocness of any such theory extension is removed by reflection on the existence of "fleeting auditory and visual sensations that occupy the periphery of our attention." [p.14] Are we in fact conscious of any such fleeting auditory and visual sensations? It certainly seems so. We know that they are there, it seems, since although we can never quite catch them individually in the net of recollection, if they weren't there, we'd notice their absence. (Whatever we catch in the net of recollection is always, ipso facto, something picked out by attention, something the existence of which is known to us in the manner Dretske calls fact awareness.) But would we in fact notice their absence if they weren't "there"? The experiments by Grimes and Rensink et al. show that we don't notice huge differences "in them," and the existence of such counter-intuitive pathologies as Anton's Syndrome (people who have become totally blind but don't yet realize it!) show that our everyday intuitions about these matters are not to be trusted. In what interesting sense does the occurrence of these putative "fleeting sensations" register on us at all? Rosenthal thinks he can slip between Scylla and Charybdis here: "All that's necessary for that to happen is a momentary event of being transitively conscious of the sensation, albeit too briefly to register as part of the subject's first-person point of view." [p.14] But why speak of transitive consciousness here at all, if it leaves the first-person point of view unaffected? Endnote 24 What is called for (by both Dretske and Rosenthal) is some form of ephemeral effect on some informational medium in the brain. That is easily found, in abundance: the brief irradiation of one's retinas by the thimble's image should do the trick, or the equally brief modification of V1, the "first" visual area of the cortex. We could say, then, that people have transitory transitive consciousness (thing awareness, in Dretske's terms) of any stimuli whose image irradiates the retinas and or modifies V1. Why not? Because, once again, you can't motivate the claim that any such medium counts as the medium of consciousness (Mangan, 1993), or the claim that such transitory modification counts as seeing (Dretske), or that the units composing such a medium count as the c-registers (Rey). Rosenthal's deliberate re-expression of my MDM leaving out FPO forces him to encounter from a different angle the problems that led me to incorporate FPO into my account. At one point, describing the Orwellian option, he says: "In this sequence, the initial stimulus did reach consciousness . . . but that conscious sensation didn't last long enough to have any noticeable mental effects; it commanded no attention, and when it ceased all memory of it was expunged." [p.8] Making sense of such a claim requires one to have some theory or model of consciousness that permits the normal mental effects of consciousness to be gathered, as it were, into a family under some tolerant umbrella, so that getting under the umbrella counts, even if one goes on to achieve few, if any, of the normal effects. Endnote 25 But not all phenomena are amenable to such treatment. Fame is my favorite exception (Dennett, forthcoming a). Consider the parallel claim, made about somebody: "In his life, he did achieve fame, but that fame didn't last long enough to have any noticeable effects in the world; he commanded no attention, and when he died, all memory of him was expunged." What on earth could this mean? Unless it meant something "technical" and unmotivated, along the lines of "he was inducted into some Hall of Fame" the claim just contradicts itself. Rosenthal attempts to rehabilitate real seeming by discovering several different levels of seeming. He shows how to drive a wedge between the "second level" seeming of the first-person point of view as constituted by heterophenomenology and a "first level" variety of seeming, which would be revealed by such phenomena as somebody swerving to avoid a truck, without that truck entering their heterophenomenological worlds. This distinction is real enough, a descendant of my distinction (Content and Consciousness, 1969) between awareness1 and awareness2, now abandoned because I saw that instead of there being sharp levels of seeming, there was something more blurry, something more like a continuum, as revealed most vividly in Marcel's experiment requiring subjects to make multiple "redundant" responses to the same stimulus (CE, p248). Normally, all the responses of a person (or animal) pull together in favor of one reading of how things seem "to" that unitary agent, but in pathological or just extreme circumstances, the "transcendental unity" of seeming can come apart. When it does, we are not entitled to assume that some still unidentified property of consciousness (a "player to be named later") belongs to some subset of the seemings. Rosenthal recognizes this, in part: he allows me the category of unconscious seemings (what, in the old days, I would have called cases of awareness2 without awareness1), but in spite of his several recognitions of the onset of blurriness in his own account as he develops the details, he persists in holding out for a sharp divide between the unconscious and the conscious, and he persists in trying to make the divide distinct from the brutally incisive rule of first-person operationalism: if the subject can't report it, it isn't part of the subject's consciousness. Heterophenomenological reports give us our best evidence about how people's conscious mental lives appear to them. But things aren't always as they seem. So Dennett's methodological appeal to these reports is neutral about whether they describe the conscious [emphasis added] events that constitute a subject's first-person viewpoint, or simply express the subject's beliefs about those mental events, events which may be entirely notional.[p.35] I don't see how Rosenthal has met the burden of establishing that these putatively conscious events do in any way "constitute the subject's first-person viewpoint"--indeed, in the passage I quoted earlier, he apparently stipulates that in "Orwellian" cases, these events don't at all constitute the first-person viewpoint--so I don't see that he has motivated his claim that these are conscious events. Ned Block's essay is his fourth in a series (1992, 1993, 1995) criticizing my theory of consciousness, and they arrive again and again at the same verdict: he can't see anything radical about it. It's either trivial or obviously false on any interpretation he can muster. He has so far overlooked the reading I intended. We all have fixed points--assumptions so obvious to us that we don't even consider them up for debate--and I have long thought that Block's inability to encounter my theory must be because he just couldn't bring himself to take seriously the idea that I was challenging some of his fixed points. Now he has confirmed this diagnosis, not just avowing that he has not taken it seriously but flatly urging no one else to take it seriously as well! He says "I hope it is just obvious to virtually everyone that the fact that things look, sound and smell more or less the way they do to us is a basic biological feature of people, not a cultural construction that children have to learn as they grow up." I must dash his hopes; it is neither obvious, nor so much as true. He goes on to offer quite a list of ideas "we should not take seriously." It is not just, as I had suspected, that he was simply incapable of taking my hypotheses seriously. "My point," he says, "is that we should not take this question seriously. It is a poor question that will just mislead us." No wonder he has been so unmoved by my account! He has discarded it on general principles, without a hearing. That is a serious failure of communication, but we can now repair it. Block agrees with me that consciousness is a "mongrel notion," and follows my strategy of titration--breaking down the ungodly mess into its components--but he underestimates the importance of the difference that language (and reportability) makes. I took a shot at it in 1969 with my distinction between the awareness1 that language-using creatures have to the contents that "enter" their "speech centers" and the awareness2 that marks appropriately discriminative uptake and is "enjoyed" equally by anteaters, ants, and electric-eye door-openers. As I have just acknowledged in my discussion of Rosenthal, that postulated speech center was all too Cartesian, and the role that language plays in consciousness is much more interesting and indirect than I saw in 1969, so I have had to make major adjustments to that doctrine. But the continuing importance of seeing a major distinction between the consciousness of language-users and the so-called consciousness of all other entities is made particularly clear by Block's work, which, by ignoring it, creates a powerful theoretical illusion. Block puts his major division between "access" and "phenomenal" consciousness, and, without further ado, declares that the "access" of awareness2 is all the access that matters. Block deliberately frames access consciousness so that language and hence reportability does not play a role. "My intent in framing the notion is to make it applicable to lower animals in virtue of their ability to use perceptual contents in guiding their actions." Endnote 26 As we shall see, this enhances the illusion that there is an "obvious" sense of consciousness in which lower animals and infants are conscious, and to make matters worse, Block actually enjoins people not to pursue the questions that would expose this illusion. My own efforts to convince Block of this in the past have all been frustrated, but he and I have kept plugging away, and now I have hopes of straightening it all out. At least he should now be able to see, for the first time, what my position is and always has been. Again and again in this paper he asks what he takes to be crushing questions, questions to which he thinks I can have no answer. He will "surely" be surprised by my answers--and even more, I expect, when I point out that these have always been my answers to them. Block's attitude in the current essay towards his own major division (between "access" and "phenomenal" consciousness) is curiously ambivalent: he wields it, acknowledges that I have rejected it, but excuses himself from mounting the defense I say it needs. "We needn't worry," he tells us, "about whether access-consciousness is really distinct from phenomenal consciousness, since the question at hand is whether either of them could be a cultural construction. I am dealing with these questions separately, but I am giving the same answer to both, so if I am wrong about their distinctness it won't matter to my argument." [p.3-4] But it does matter, since it is the very move of supposing that he can make this cleavage between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness that conceals from him the way in which consciousness could be a cultural construction. By looking at two mis-isolated components of the phenomenon, Block has convinced himself that since neither "separately" could be a cultural construction, consciousness cannot be a cultural construction. But these supposed sorts of consciousness don't make sense "separately"--they only seem to do so. To put it bluntly--for a few more details, see "The Path Not Taken," (1995b) my commentary on Block's most recent sally in BBS--Block can't distinguish phenomenal consciousness from phenomenal unconsciousness without introducing some notion of access, a point he almost sees: "There is a 'me'-ness to phenomenal consciousness." Like Dretske, he needs there to be some sort of uptake to ensure that the "phenomenal" is to or for some subject--or could phenomenal itches and aromas just hang around being conscious without being conscious to anyone? Rosenthal enunciates as if it were a constitutive principle the intuitive demand that raises these problems for Dretske and Block: "Still if one is in no way at all transitively conscious of a particular mental state, then that state is not a conscious state." [p.12] This "transitive" consciousness must be a variety of "access" consciousness, for it relates "one" to what "one is conscious of". But once we let access come back in, we will have to ask what sort of access we are talking about (for "phenomenal" consciousness, mind you). Is the access to color boundary information enjoyed by the part of your brain that controls eye-movements sufficient? If it is, then the anesthetized subject (a monkey, most likely) whose eyes move in response to these "perceived" colors is enjoying phenomenal consciousness. And so forth. (In this area I think Ivan Fox's essay has valuable further lessons to offer.) Block doesn't tell us anything about which features of access would suffice for phenomenal consciousness, but in any case, however Block would resolve this issue, I resolve it, as he correctly notes, via the concept of cerebral celebrity. This idea "seems more a theory of access-consciousness than any of the other elements of the mongrel" but it is also, I claim, a theory of phenomenal consciousness (after all, I deny the distinction). Can this really be so? Could the sort of access requisite for phenomenal consciousness really be "constructed" out of cerebral celebrity, and could this feature in turn be a cultural construction? Block is forthright in his incredulity. "I hope Dennett tells us how, according to him, cerebral celebrity could be a cultural construction." But I already have, at great length, over more than a decade. He just didn't notice. He helpfully italicizes his main error for us: "But surely it is nothing other than a biological fact about people--not a cultural construction--that some brain representations persevere enough to affect memory, control behavior, etc." [p.5] Surely? No. Here Block completely overlooks all my patient efforts to explain precisely why cerebral celebrity is not a biologically guaranteed phenomenon. This is the point of all my discussion (going back to Elbow Room) of the evolution of consciousness: to open up as a serious biological possibility the idea that our brains are not organized at birth, thanks to our animal heritage, in ways that automatically guarantee the sorts of mutual influence of parts that is the hallmark of "our access" to conscious contents. My little thought experiment about talking to oneself (first in Elbow Room, pp.38-43, and, elaborated, in CE, pp193ff) is central. It suggests a way--a dead simple way, just to get our imaginations moving in the right direction--in which a culturally "injected" factor, the use of language, could dramatically alter the functionally available informational pathways in a brain. Now does Block think that my story is inconceivable? Does he think it is inconceivable that human infants, prior to rudimentary mastery of a language, and the concomitant habits of self-stimulation, have brain organizations that do not yet support "access" consciousness beyond the sorts "lower" animals enjoy? Probably not. But tempting though it undoubtedly is, he may not now fall back on his undefended distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness. He is in no position to say: "Surely" these lower animals, even if they do lack human-style access consciousness, have phenomenal consciousness?! (cf Lockwood, 1993, Nagel, 1991, Dennett, 1995c) In an elegant paper, "Cued and detached representations in animal cognition," Peter Grdenfors (forthcoming) points out "why a snake can't think of a mouse." It seems that a snake does not have a central representation of a mouse but relies solely on transduced information. The snake exploits three different sensory systems in relation to prey, like a mouse. To strike the mouse, the snake uses its visual system (or thermal sensors). When struck, the mouse normally does not die immediately, but runs away for some distance. To locate the mouse, once the prey has been struck, the snake uses its sense of smell. The search behavior is exclusively wired to this modality. Even if the mouse happens to die right in front of the eyes of the snake, it will still follow the smell trace of the mouse in order to find it. This unimodality is particularly evident in snakes like boas and pythons, where the prey often is held fast in the coils of the snake's body, when it .e.g. hangs from a branch. Despite the fact that the snake must have ample proprioceptory information about the location of the prey it holds, it searches stochastically for it, all around, only with the help of the olfactory sense organs. (Sjlander, 1993, p. 3) Finally, after the mouse has been located, the snake must find its head in order to swallow it. This could obviously be done with the aid of smell or sight, but in snakes this process uses only tactile information. Thus the snake uses three separate modalities to catch and eat a mouse. Can we talk about what the snake, itself, "has access" to, or just about what its various parts have access to? Is any of that obviously sufficient for "phenomenal" (or any other kind of) consciousness? What--if anything--is it like to be a (whole) snake? Postponing consideration of that question, does such an example render plausible--at least worth exploring--my hypothesis? My radical proposal is that the sorts of internal integrating systems the snake so dramatically lacks but we have are in fact crucial for consciousness, and they are not ours at birth, but something we gradually acquire, thanks in no small measure to what Block calls "cultural injection." I hope that, unlike Block, you think these are ideas that just might be worth taking seriously. Block says: "True, consciousness modulates cerebral celebrity, but it does not create it." It's almost the other way around: cerebral celebrity is consciousness, and it is, in part, a cultural creation. That, at any rate, is the phantom Dennettian claim that Block makes such a labor of searching for. He's utterly right about the banality of the view that it takes culture to think of oneself as a federal self; the interesting view is that it takes culture to become a federal self. But he doesn't consider this view. Whenever Block says "Surely," look for what we might call a mental block. Here is another: "Surely, in any culture that allows the material and psychological necessities of life, people genetically like us will have experiences much like ours; there will be something it is like for them to see and hear and smell things that is much like what it is like for us to do these things." [p11]. Block says "in any culture"--and I have never claimed that consciousness is a product of a very specific culture, since all sorts of human cultures for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years have had the perquisites. So Block ignores here the appropriate case, given my claims. What about the (fortunately, imaginary) case of Robinson Crusoe human beings, each raised in total isolation, in an entirely depopulated, a-social, a-cultural world, with no mother to cuddle and feed them, no language to learn, no human interactions at all? Is it obvious that "there will be something it is like for them to see and hear and smell things that is much like what it is like for us to do these things"? I don't think so. But "surely," you retort, however appallingly different it would be, it would be like something! Well, here is where "what it is like" runs into trouble. Is it obvious that it is "like something" to be an 8-month fetus in the womb? Is it obvious that it is "like something" to be a python? The less the functional similarities between normal adult, socialized consciousness and the test case under consideration, the less obvious it is that we are entitled to speak of "what it is like". Block's confidence about phenomenal consciousness masks this growing tension by supposing, optimistically, that of course there is something we can hold constant, in spite of all these differences in "access" consciousness: phenomenal consciousness. With this I flat disagree, and that is the primary source of our miscommunication up to now. Endnote 27 When we turn to Block's discussion of my comparison between consciousness and money, I must first correct a misrepresentation of my view. I don't say--let alone "repeatedly"--that you can't have consciousness unless you have the concept of consciousness, but that the phenomenon of consciousness depends on its subjects having a certain family of concepts (none of them necessarily any concept of consciousness). In CE, I speak of consciousness depending on "its associated concepts" (p.24). Block finds the one passage in my homage to Jaynes in which I deliberately overstated this point (while drawing attention to its "paradoxical" flavor). Let me try to undo the damage of that bit of bravado. Acquiring a concept is, on almost any view of concepts I have encountered, partly a matter of acquiring a new competence; before you had the concept of x, you couldn't really y, but now thanks to your mastery of the concept of x (and its family members and neighbors--don't try to pin some sort of atomism on me here), you can y, or more easily y, or more spontaneously y. Now if consciousness is "good for something"--if having it gives one competences one would lack without it--then there should be nothing surprising or metaphysically suspect about the claim that the way you make something conscious is by giving it (however this is done) some concepts that it doesn't already have. And so it is somewhat plausible--at least worthy of consideration, I would have thought--that acquiring concepts is partly a matter of, or contributes to, building new accessibility relations between disparate elements of a cognitive system. Concepts, you might say, are software links, not hardware links. Well then, here's an idea: maybe consciousness just is something that you gain by acquiring a certain sort of conceptual apparatus that you aren't born with! If you say, but "surely" that couldn't be true, since you have to be conscious to have concepts in the first place, I reply: that is a Big Mistake that Jaynes helped overthrow. "It is hard to take seriously the idea that the human capacity to see and access [emphasis added] rich displays of colors and shapes is a cultural construction that requires its own concept." It is too hard for Block to take seriously, that's for sure. But if he were right, why don't the experimenters run the same color experiments on non-human mammals? Hint: because non-human mammals don't "have access" to all the richness of the colors and shapes their nervous systems nevertheless discriminate in one way or another (cf. footnote 10 above on Dretske on color vision in animals). Now perhaps you want to insist that the animals do "have access" to all this richness, but just can't harness it the way we can, to answer questions, etc., etc. That, however, is a surmise that is fast losing ground, and rightly so. The idea that we can isolate a notion of "access"--"you know, conscious access"--that is independent of all the myriad things that access thereby enables is just an artifact of imaginative inertia. It has no independent warrant whatever. 7. Qualia Refuse to go Quietly What is color? Joseph Tolliver clearly describes the logical space and the motivations behind the various theories of color that have recently been proposed. By my lights, however, he has been insufficiently critical of the shared assumptions of the literature he considers; what should be seen as differences of emphasis have been pumped up into differences of doctrine, rendered spuriously at odds by being forced into the procrustean bed of essentialism, leading, as we have seen, to hysterical realism. In fact, thanks to Tolliver, hysterical realism can be seen in a particularly clear light. Consider his lovely example, alexandrite, the philosopher's stone indeed. In sunlight it looks blue-green and in incandescent light or candlelight, it looks red. Endnote 28 What color is it really? What makes anybody think this question must have an answer? Essentialism. They think color has a real essence, and hence they cannot tolerate a view that leaves the answer to such questions indeterminate. Thus Edward Averill, raising his problems of counterfactual colors, poses a litmus test for theories of color parallel to my stumper about magnets. What would we say: that gold had changed its color or that the true color of gold had been obscured? As Tolliver notes, when my evolutionary theory faces this situation, it fails to resolve it. I don't view that as a criticism, however, for I don't think that the question of what color gold really is (in "all possible worlds") deserves attention. He sees that my evolutionary account gives you a "principled means" of identifying the normal conditions, relative to the functions, and hence the standards, by which we identify the class of observers. But it must be essentialism ("color is a transworld property") that leads him to think that these evolutionary considerations don't suffice, since they don't provide similarly "principled" ways of fixing the standard viewing conditions of colored things that played no role in our evolution, such as "lasers, dichromic filters, gem stones, stars, and Benham disks." [p.22] So what? All such colors should be considered mere byproducts of the perceptual machinery designed to respond to the colors that have had evolutionary significance for us or our ancestors. If the sky's being blue (to us) is just a byproduct of the evolutionary design processes that adjusted human color vision, then no functional account (which would assume that the sky "ought" to look some particular color under some canonical circumstances) is needed. If, however, some features of our responsivity to color (e.g., the pleasure we take in seeing blue) itself derives, indirectly, from some later evolutionary response to this byproduct, then the sky's being blue is "right"--but now for a reason that is purely anthropocentric, and none the worse for that! Tolliver also makes the minor error of elevating my evolutionary explanation of the grounding of color into some sort of constitutive claim on my part. Evolution answers the question for us, since evolution is the source of our functionality, but if the Creationists' story were true, then God the Artificer would have to hold the key. That's fine with me, as a fantasy. For I take it that we can readily imagine a race of robots endowed by their creators with a sort of "color" vision (scare-quotes to mollify the scaredy-cats), in which an entirely different set of patterns ruled, and ruled for equally "principled" reasons. In that world, thanks to the design decisions of the robots' creators, undesigned things (gem stones, stars, the sky) could fit into color-equivalence classes different from ours. On either this story or our non-fantastic evolutionary story, we anchor the standard conditions to the class of normal observers by functional considerations. Tolliver's own functionalism is clearly superior to the alternatives he considers, but I think he misses a few crucial points. Functional architecture is the formal structure that makes possible the construction of complex representations within the symbolic system. But the functional architecture is not another representation over and above the representations defined by means of it. [p.27] True, but the functional architecture does contribute content--just not by "being a representation." There are many other ways of contributing content. Since this is an oft-ignored possibility, I wish I had hammered harder on this theme when I first raised it, in my example of the "thing about redheads" in "Beyond Belief" (1982, pp. 33-4; as reprinted in The Intentional Stance, pp148-9.) The idea that content must all be packaged in symbols or syntactic properties of representations is a very bad idea. Tolliver shows how a color coding system can be implemented by ordered triples, since every perceivable color can be uniquely placed in a three-space, the color solid. Endnote 29 "Surely," one is inclined to argue, a system of color coding all by itself doesn't amount to subjective color experience; there is nothing exciting or pleasurable, for instance, about ordered triples! Adding a fourth variable to represent the appropriate "affect" would not be a step in the right direction, and "translating" the ordered triples back into "subjective colors" (or qualia) would be a step in the wrong direction--a step back into the Cartesian Theater. We take a step in the direction of genuine explanation by postulating that these ordered triples are ensconced in a functional architecture in such a way that they have the right sorts of high-powered functions--the sort of thing Hardin and (earlier) Meehl note. That, the excitement potential of colors, and their capacity to soothe and delight us, is part of the content of color properties, and it is--must be--embodied in the functional architecture of the color system. The person who cannot use color as an alarm, as a reminder, as an ease in tracking or aide-memoire, does not have our color system. My view of colors is an instance of what Stephen White calls the holistic strategy towards the problem of saying what experienced colors are, but Ned Block has raised his "Inverted Earth" fantasy against any such view. I did not discuss Block's thought experiment in CE, thinking its intricacies would not repay the time and effort it would take to present and criticize them, especially since I thought I had provided all the tools necessary to scuttle his case for anyone who sought them. That was wrong. White's analysis of the difficulties facing Block's thought experiment as published, and its subsequent post-publication variations, goes far beyond anything I had laid the ground for. And since I have failed to convince large and important segments of the philosophical audience, I have been making at least a tactical error which White's work repairs. White treats patiently what I rush by with a few gestures. For instance, his expansion of Block's 4-stage example to 5 stages permits him to spell out--in enough imaginative detail to persuade--the sorts of thoughts "from the inside" that would go on in you were you to be in Block's posited circumstances. This was what I was getting at in CE at pp.393ff, especially the example of the shade of blue that reminds you of the car in which you once crashed. But White works it out so carefully, so crisply, that the point cannot be lost. See especially his nice observation on the inevitability of overcompensation, should your old hard-to-suppress inclination spontaneously disappear faster than you expected. Another excellent point: the subpersonal level could change in a gradual way while the personal level might stick for awhile, until it flipped in a "gestalt switch." White then takes on notional worlds, an idea that I left rather vague and impressionistic in "Beyond Belief," and sharpens it up with a variety of his own insights and innovations to meet a host of objections. For the reasons discussed in the section on cow-sharks, I have no stomach for discussions of amnesiacs in blinding snowstorms who think they are being attacked by a bear (and are under the impression that other snow-covered amnesiacs are currently in the same pickle!), but for those who think such counterexamples are telling, White has a detailed response, thus forcing the anti-relationalists to take these ideas seriously. As he concludes from his examination, "Thus if we think seriously about the full range of discriminatory skills that a relational account can allow, its inadequacy as an account of our experience is far less obvious." [p.38] Hear, hear. White's analysis also sharpens some points in Block's thought experiment that then invite a short-cut objection that can be used to forestall whole families of similar enterprises. In one of Block's variations, you have an identical twin, who is sent off to Inverted Earth with contact lenses chronically installed. As White notes: "Here we have two subjects whose experiences have all the same qualitative properties, and hence the same qualitative content, but different intentional contents." [p.5]. Block's argument requires this assumption, but where does it come from? Must qualia "supervene on" physical constitution? Thomas Nagel once claimed otherwise, in conversation with me; he insisted that there was no way to tell of two identical twins whether they had identical qualia. Whether or not qualia do supervene on physical constitution, something else definitely does, and that is what we might call functional micro-implementation--e.g., Tolliver's ordered triples of something small in the brain. Thus in "Instead of Qualia" (1994b), I describe color-discriminating robots that use numbers in registers to code for the different "subjective" colors they discriminate. The particular number systems they use (functionally parallel to the "file keeping" system White describes) are physical micro-details that anchor functions, but the numbers (which are arbitrary) could all be inverted without any detectable functional change. These, presumably, are not qualia that many qualophiles could love; they are in fact what I propose instead of qualia. And I claim that they can do, without mystery, all the work qualia were traditionally supposed to do--including telling qualia-inversion fantasies! We can retell Block's thought experiment with two identical robots, one of whom is sent off to Inverted Earth with contact lenses chronically installed. Then we will have two robots whose "experiences" have all the same details of functional micro-implementation, but different intentional contents. Since everything Block says of you and your twin would also be true of the robot and its twin on Inverted Earth, for exactly the same reasons, and since qualia are not enjoyed by the robots (ex hypothesi), Block's argument cannot be used to show why a functionalist needs to posit qualia. Functional micro-implementation schemes will do just as well. Jeff McConnell takes equal pains in his examination of another fantasy, Frank Jackson's case of Mary the color scientist who is, in Diana Raffman's fine phrase, chromatically challenged. I gave Mary short shrift in CE, and McConnell gives her long shrift in the attempt to demonstrate that Jackson's Knowledge Argument "remains alive and well" in the wake of my criticisms. I think he has drastically underestimated their subversiveness. They challenge not just the details but the whole strategy of attempting to prove anything by Jackson's methods. I am claiming that it counts for nothing--nothing at all--that Jackson's (or McConnell's or anybody's) intuitions balk at my brusque alternative claim about Mary's powers. Their fixed points are not my fixed points, but precisely the target of my attack. The most that can be said for an intuition pump such as Jackson's, then, is that it dramatizes these tacit presumptions, without giving them any added support. Now of course I might be wrong, but one cannot defeat my counterargument by blandly describing as an "insight" something I have been at considerable pains to deny. In any case, McConnell gradually concedes some ground, if only for the sake of argument, adding proviso after proviso to the original story. By the time he is through, Jackson's deceptively crisp scenario has given way to the utterly imponderable hypothesis that "it does not seem inconsistent to suppose" that there could be a neuro-omniscient but imaginationally challenged person who, in virtue of the latter and in spite of the former, lacked the ability to construct a special sort of knowledge to be called "imaginative knowledge" (defined in terms of the suspect category of phenomenal properties). McConnell may think that the Knowledge Argument is still "alive and well" after this exercise, but it sure looks like a shadow of its former self to me, barely able to hold our attention, let alone vivify our convictions. At one juncture McConnell points to the gap in his own case: "My counterargument shows that unless there is a defect in the mechanics of the Knowledge Argument or a deep flaw in our common sense about what Mary knows, then the standard positions about the nature of the mind are untenable." But all along I have been claiming that there is just such a deep flaw in our common sense. Endnote 30 Our common sense is strongly if covertly committed to the Cartesian Theater, and since many philosophers have wondered who on earth I can be arguing against (since they certainly weren't committed to there being a Cartesian Theater!), it will be instructive to show how McConnell's own commitment to the Cartesian Theater arises, especially since it is nicely concealed in his quite standard exploitation of familiar philosophical assumptions. He builds his case by extending the received wisdom about external reference in ordinary language to internal reference: The success of demonstrative reference depends upon the demonstratum's being picked out for demonstrator and audience by a mode or manner of presentation--by something that individuates the cognitive significance of referring expressions. [emphasis added] [p24] These assumptions are widely shared. It has seemed harmless to many philosophers of mind to couch their discussions of reference in perception, knowledge by acquaintance, inner ostension, and the like in the terms so well analyzed by philosophers of language dealing with reference, ostension, and similar phenomena in ordinary language. But as this passage nicely illustrates, these are poisoned fruits that quietly force the hand of the theorist: we have to have an inner audience, to whom things are presented, if we are to take these familiar extensions of linguistic categories literally (and if not literally, exactly what is left to be asserted?). Thus philosophers have debates about "modes of presentation" versus "definite descriptions in the language of thought" and the like, but these only make sense if we are presupposing an inner agent, capable of appreciating or perceiving presentations, or understanding the terms of the definite descriptions, but still in need of being informed about the matter in question, which is still somehow external to the agent. In other words, these discussions all presuppose a Cartesian Theater occupied by a Central Meaner who either has or has not yet been apprised of some fact that must somehow be borne to him on the vehicle of some show that must be presented, or some inner speech act that must be uttered, heard, and understood. But this is forlorn. As I argued at length in CE, this too-powerful inner agent has to be broken down, and all its work has to be distributed in both space and time in the brain. When that is done, the properties by which "agents" are "acquainted with" this and that have to be broken down as well. That is the point, once again, of my answer to the question of how I know these things: because a knower and reporter of such things is what is me. (CE, p. 410) But see how McConnell puts it: We know our qualitative mental states by acquaintance, picking them out by direct reference as states "like this," so to speak, producing states of recognition or imagination for display [to whom, pray tell?] or ostending to ourselves [to our selves?] occurrent states. [p.25] This isn't common sense; this is disaster, for as he himself shows, it leads quite inexorably to "irreducibly mental properties." Loar, on McConnell's reading, is thus headed in the right direction in trying to forestall this development. McConnell's objection to Loar--the imagined Marcy--is thus question-begging: "Imagine someone, for example, who can, without physical evidence, report and categorize many of her own brain states, even states that lack qualitative character [emphasis added]." [p.28] But what is "qualitative character" that might thus be absent? Who says that there are any states that even have "qualitative character"? It seems obvious to McConnell that there are "phenomenal properties," and so he never truly confronts the denial I am issuing. Perhaps the most telling instance--telling, because it strikes him as so tangential that he buries it in footnote 19--is the following: The critic of the Knowledge Argument, however, must take the position that her neuroscientific expertise would not just enable her to do this but would constitute the grasping of phenomenal red, and this is implausible. For it seems easy to imagine a person in Mary's shoes, someone perhaps unlike Mary biologically, who doesn't have the powers of hallucination Flanagan supposes but about whom we would say the things Jackson says of Mary. I have at least tried to cast doubt on any such appeals to what "seems easy to imagine" in these cases, claiming that after one undergoes a certain amount of factual enrichment about the nature of color perception and related topics, these things no longer seem so easy to imagine after all. That they seem so to McConnell is thus a biographical fact of no immediate use in an argument--at least not in an argument against me. Eric Lormand brings out vividly how the Friends of the Cartesian Theater can cling to their fantasies. He shows how many different escape hatches there are for Theater-lovers, and points out that I can't block them all at once. No doubt. For instance, you can always "postulate a distinctive, nonprimitive but also nonrational means of access" [p.13], or some other variety of "access mechanism" if you want to, but why? Whose access to what? My point was to remove the motivation, but if you still want to posit qualia, I doubt that I can show that you will inevitably contradict yourself. I did not claim to prove a priori that there could not be a Cartesian Theater; I claimed to prove, empirically, that there was no Cartesian Theater, and that since there wasn't one, theories that presuppose otherwise must be wrong. Endnote 31 There is an empirical point and then there is an a priori point, and the two have not yet been clearly enough distinguished--by me or my readers. Consider the Brobdignagians, the giant people of Gulliver's Travels, and suppose we set out to do some anthropology there, and decided that the best way to do this was to make a giant humanoid puppet of sorts, controlled by Sam, a regular-sized human being in the control room in the giant head. (I guess that is at least as "logically possible" as the scenarios in other thought experiments that are taken seriously.) Sam succeeds in passing for Brobdignagian in his giant person suit, but then one day he encounters Brobdignagian Dennett sounding off on the unreality of the Cartesian Theater with its Central Meaner. Risky moment! Sam pushes the laugh button, and directs the giant speech center to compose the appropriate response (in translation): "Ha Ha! Who could ever take seriously the idea that there was a control room in the head, the destination of all the input, and the source of all the output! Such a fantasy!"--all the time hoping that his ruse would not be uncovered. Yes, this thought experiment shows that a Cartesian Theater is "possible," but we already know that there are no such places in our own brains--that's the empirical point. We also know--this is the a priori point--that sooner or later as we peel the layers off any agent, we have to bottom out in an agent that doesn't have a central puppeteer, and this agent will accomplish its aims by distributing the work in the space and time of whatever counts as its brain. Putting the two points together, we see that we have to live with these implications sooner, not later. We have to live with them now. Lormand vividly supports my contention that qualia and the Cartesian Theater stand or fall together. The reason he is a Friend of the Theater is that he thinks he has to have qualia, and qualia without a Theater is no show at all. But then we must ask: What does the claim that there really are qualia get him? What does it explain? I'm not asking for a lot. I'd be content if his only answer was: "It explains my unshakable belief that I've got qualia!" But even this Lormand concedes to me. It would be quite possible, he says, to believe you had qualia when you didn't. Philosophically naive zimbos, for instance, would fervently believe they have qualia. As I said in my discussion of Levine, I view zimbos as a reductio. Others don't, but that's their problem, not mine. The hydra-headed qualia live on, in Lormand's various options, shifting from one vision to another. That is enough to establish one of my main points for me: you simply cannot talk about qualia with the presumption that everyone knows what you're talking about. These different avenues are too different. It is only equivocation that permits the various different qualophiles to claim they agree about something, to wit: qualia. 8. Luck , Regret, and Kinds of Persons Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger across a crowded room--or you may not, and it may make all the difference, as the song suggests. For the stranger might have tempted you into moral dilemmas that you were not "ethically gifted" enough to resolve honorably, and then your life might end in ignominy, disgrace, and bitter regret. Or the stranger might have provoked you to embark in a direction that led you to acts of great courage and self-sacrifice, bestowing on you a hero's role that otherwise would have been inaccessible to you. In such a case, luck makes a huge difference, we can reasonably suppose, and has nothing to do with the prospect of negligence, or the capacity to estimate probabilities, important though those considerations often are. I take myself to have been, so far, quite a good fellow; I have no terrible sins on my conscience. But I am also quite sure that there are temptations that, had they been placed before me, I would not have been able to resist. Lucky me; I have been spared them, and hence can still hold my head up high. It is not just luck, of course; policy has had something to do with it. I don't go looking for trouble, but I also don't go looking for opportunities to be a hero. Some people face life with a different attitude: they play for high stakes--hero or villain, with little likelihood of a bland outcome. And surely Michael Slote is right that some people are more ethically gifted than others by accident of birth--and other accidents. Perhaps in the best of all possible worlds, only the ethically gifted would be inspired to play for high stakes lives, while we more cowardly and self-indulgent folks just tried to keep our noses clean. I am very glad Slote didn't give up on me altogether. After Elbow Room, in which I put some of his good work to good use, he proposed we join forces on an article developing further our shared views about luck, modality and free will, to which I readily agreed. He sent me some notes and sketches, but for reasons unknown to me, I never picked up my end. The engine was running, but somehow I couldn't let out the clutch. His essay on this occasion reminds me of how fruitful I find his perspective, and makes me regret all the more my strange inactivity in response to his previous sally. On this occasion, the focus is on the curious role of luck in rendering our acts blameworthy or praiseworthy. When it comes to assigning blame and credit, Slote suggests, we are confronted by an irresoluble war of competing intuitions. Blame should not be a matter of luck at all, proclaims one intuition, but living by that standard would seem to force us to absolve everyone always, which goes equally against the grain. One variety of compromise would be what Slote calls moral criticism without blame. This would extend to adults at their most responsible the attitude we tend to endorse towards young children; since we want them to improve, we are firm in our condemnation of their bad behavior, but we don't condemn them. We hold them quasi-responsible, you might say, not thereby illuminating anything. Isn't it the case that any policy, any ethical theory, must accept luck as part of the background? Given that luck is always going to play a large role, what is the sane, defensible policy with regard to luck? Set up a system that encourages individuals to take luck into consideration in a reasonable way by not permitting them to cite bad luck when it leads them astray. The culpability of the driver is settled as a matter of higher-order holding accountable: we have given you sufficient moral education so that from now on you are a person (in Carol Rovane's sense), deemed accountable, like it or not, not only for your acts but for your policies. If you are reckless and get away with it, you are just lucky, but if you are reckless and thereby bring about great harm, you will have no excuse. If you are not reckless but bring about great harm, your blame will be diminished. Slote expresses mild sympathy for such a policy (see fn 4), but thinks it won't do. The problem, I gather, is that since there would still be unsupportably counter-intuitive implications in any such policy (in Slote's eyes), it could be maintained only by slipping in one way or another into the systematic disingenuousness Bernard Williams (1985 p.101) calls "Government House utilitarianism," Peter Vallentyne has suggested to him that the situation is not so grim; tying praise and blame to probabilities, not outcomes, has some intuitive support in any case, so some of the jarring intuitions might be ignored. Slote finds this attractive, but thinks that "it is a mistake to say nothing more needs to be said." [p16] Let me try to fill that gap a little. Slote lists two items of common-sense that obtrude: a) the difference of blameworthiness between cases where an accident occurs and cases where none occurs and b) our intuitive sense that the person whose negligence leads to an accident doesn't enjoy a low degree of blameworthiness (simply because of the extreme unlikelihood of an accident). [p.17] I suggest that our intuitions are playing tricks on us here--at least to some extent. With regard to a), consider the case in which you learn that Jones has enticed your child to play Russian roulette with a loaded revolver. Fortunately, both survive unharmed, but your moral condemnation of Jones will be scarcely diminished compared to the case in which your child actually dies. Is he blameworthy? He most certainly is. We don't get to put him in prison for murder, thanks to his undeserved luck, but we might think it entirely appropriate to ensure that nobody ever forgot, for the rest of his days, what an evil thing he did. In other words, I think Jones is just as blameworthy in both cases, even though there is vastly more harm to regret, and therefore more justifiable anger, in the catastrophic case, and I think common sense is comfortable with this, after all. Now go to the other extreme, and imagine the following variation on the scenic drive. You are showing friends the mountain scenery, and see a scenic lookout turnoff up ahead. "Let's just stop, so I can show this magnificent view to you!" you say, but your friends demur. "Don't bother, we can see it well enough while moving along." But you persist, and as you turn off the highway into the lookout, sunlight glinting off your windshield momentarily blinds the schoolbus driver, and calamity ensues. In this case, you broke no laws, you weren't negligent in any way, you were a good, safe driver. But for the rest of your life you will surely be racked with regret, thinking "if only I hadn't persisted!" This regret is not self-reproach; you know in your heart that you did nothing wrong. But this regret about that awful free choice of yours will perhaps overwhelm your thoughts--and the thoughts of all the parents of those dead schoolchildren--for years. Now alter the circumstances ever so slightly: in order to enter the scenic turnoff, you had to brake rather more suddenly than cars typically do, and it was the distraction of the bus driver in response to your (arguably) negligent braking that caused the accident. A tiny bit of negligence now, and at least as much regret. How much self-reproach? How much moral blameworthiness? Can we isolate in our imaginations the regret that any bad-outcome act is likely to provoke, and distinguish it clearly and reliably from the moral (self-)condemnation--if any--that is provoked in unison? If not, then perhaps--this is just a hypothesis for further thought-experimental exploration--Slote's conviction that a) and b) are worthy items of common-sense can be undermined. But there is still more to be said, of course. Saving the best for last, I come to Carol Rovane's wonderfully constructive essay. She takes the main ideas in "Conditions of Personhood" and fixes them. They needed fixing. It is great to see ideas I like a lot protected from second-rate versions of them--my own. She wonders whether I will reject her revisions and elaborations or embrace them. I embrace them, with a few further amendments and virtually no reservations worth mentioning. Thus she is right that (1) my six conditions of personhood fall naturally into two groups of three; (2) I would be in much better position if I retreated from Kant as she recommends, opening up ethical disagreement among persons; (3) persons are committed to all-things-considered judgments, even though we can't actually make them; (4) I can have my naturalism and gradualism, and still have a rather sharp watershed dividing the persons from the non-persons; (5) her alternative is a "more integrated, and explanatorily complete, conception of the person, in which the ethical and metaphysical dimensions of personhood are in perfect accord." [ms, p.18] Indeed, I just made use of points (4) and (5) in my commentary on Slote. Although different human beings may not be equally "ethically gifted," those that have the capacity to treat others as persons, are precisely those who are fit to be run through the mill of reason-giving. Those who are disqualified for personhood by not being up to the exercise are excused, but for those who are fit, there is indeed a choice, and if you are in this special category, you can stand convicted of having made a wrong (but informed, rational) choice. This watershed permits us to settle the inevitable penumbral cases of near-persons, persons-to-be, persons on the verge of incompetence, etc., in an ethically stable and satisfying way. (It doesn't settle all the morally troubling cases, of course--that would be too much to ask for--but it lays the ground for settling them as best we can.) As she says, she argues "from the ethical criterion of personhood to Dennett's list of conditions of metaphysical personhood, thereby preserving his uncompromisingly normative approach." [ms,.p.18] What about her discussion of rationality, evaluation, and higher order intentionality in animals? I have come to realize in recent years that human rationality is so much more powerful than that of any animal, that, as she says, my "list of six conditions does not capture a spectrum of rational sophistication at all." [p.48] I have begun discussing alternative spectra in recent years (in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and "Learning and Labeling" 1993c) and I intend to develop these ideas further, in a little book to be called Kinds of Minds, which will soon be completed. Therein I will offer a somewhat different account from the one sketched by Rovane, but not different in any way that undercuts her points. I have been stumbling along towards this for years. Ashley's dog was just the first of many cases to consider. Reading, listening to, and even working with ethologists over the years has taught me a lot about the differences, as well as the similarities, between animal and human minds. Discussing Gricean communication, she notes that "it is the absence of a guarantee for the first sort of reliability that affords the possibility of sincerity and insincerity." [p.45] Yes, as Gibsonians would say, there are affordances here, affordances that simply do not exist for non-persons, such as vervet monkeys and other animal quasi-communicators. (I now think, by the way, that Sperber and Wilson's (1986) vision of communication is much more realistic than Grice's, and would save some minor errors of over-idealization in her account.) What, finally, of her punch line about multiple and group persons? I have already granted MPD--with suitable caveats--as she notes. In my discussion of Lynne Rudder Baker above, I opened the door to group persons, not quite for the first time. There is my brief definition and discussion of FPD, "Fractional Personality Disorder," CE, pp.422-423. Since my theory of the self (or personhood) "predicts" FPD, I am now on the lookout for instances of its acknowledgment in print. My favorite to date is the comment by one of the actors in the Coen brothers' film, "Barton Fink," when asked what it was like to act in a film with two directors. The reply: "Oh, there was only one director; he just had two bodies." References Aldrich, Virgil, 1970, review of Dretske, Journal of Philosophy, 67, pp995-1006. Block, Ned, 1992, "Begging the question against phenomenal consciousness," (commentary on Dennett Kinsbourne), Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 15, pp205-6. --1993, review of Dennett, CE,1991, Journal of Philosophy, 90, pp.181-93 --1995, "On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness," Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 18, pp.?? Brown, Roger, and Herrnstein, Richard J., 1975, Psychology, Boston: Little, Brown. Churchland, Paul, 1979, Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. 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I am grateful for constructive feedback from Nikola Grahek and Diana Raffman, at the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts, and Derek Browne and his colleagues and students at Canterbury University, Christchurch, New Zealand, where drafts of this essay were prepared and discussed. 2. The Fox Islands Thorofare is a beautiful but treacherous passage between the Scylla of North Haven and the Charybis of Vinal Haven, in Penobscot Bay. 3. Good Old Fashioned AI (Haugeland, 1985) and Language of Thought (Fodor, 1975). 4. Dedictomorphs are zombies, he tells us [p59], and I wonder how one can tell whether a particular implementation of Cog is a dedictomorph. Not by behavior, since a dedictomorph "may conform to the outward behavior of persons with de re states." But then why should the Cog team worry about getting de re states into Cog? 5. By far the best model of a research program in phenomenology that uses the fruits of careful introspection to discern the features of engineering models is Douglas Hofstadter Fluid Analogy Research Group. See Hofstadter, 1995 (and my review, forthcoming in Complexity) Mitchell (1993), and French (forthcoming). 6. I was surprised that Fox didn't use the standard term "user illusion" It fits his case rather well, since he claims that the phenomenal world is a benign, designed illusion of sorts (a philosophical illusion). 7. At just one point, I thought Fox's phenomenology fell into error. He claims [p14] to be able to "remember melodies which (for me) have an intervalic structure but no pitch." I cannot do this, any more than I can remember or imagine a melody which reels off in no particular tempo. Melody seems entirely unlike imagined speech in this regard; imagined speech, for me and others I have queried, can have tempo and prosodic contour without any pitch. I raised the melody issue with Diana Raffman and Ray Jackendoff, both accomplished musicians; neither of them can do what Fox says he can do, so either he has a rare talent, or has given us a demonstration of how phenomenologists can be wrong about even their carefully considered claims. 8. In the same article Dretske also cites the amazing case of eidetic imagery reported by Stromeyer and Psotka in Nature, 1970, in support of his theory of "thing-awareness". But Stromeyer and Psotka's report turned out to be too good to be true. Their subject refused to cooperate with those who wanted to replicate the original experiment, and it is now generally presumed that the results were fraudulent, a practical joke played on the experimenters, most likely. This is not a trivial matter; Dretske needs something like this imaginary result to support his position, just as my theory needs support of the sort provided by Grimes' experiments, and more recently, those of Rensink, O'Regan and Clarke, to be described shortly. (Dretske also cites, in fn. 13, the "well-known experimental demonstration" by C. W. Perky. This series of experiments--conducted in 1910!--is in fact seldom cited any more, and is perhaps best known for not being replicated by others. For a neutral account, see Brown and Herrnstein, 1975, pp435-6.) 9. The game of Hide the Thimble actually exploits something very close to Dretske's concept of non-epistemic seeing. The rules are clear: you must hide the thimble in plain sight. It must not be concealed behind anything, for instance, or too high on a shelf to fall within the visual fields of the searchers. Or one might say: the "hidden" thimble must be visible. Is something that is visible seen as soon as it can be seen by someone looking at it? That seems to be what Dretske's concept of non-epistemic seeing insists upon. 10. Dretske misses the point of my claims about the lack of clarity of animal consciousness--a fact that I would think would have become obvious to him when he noted, as he does, the passages in which I calmly grant sight--color vision--to birds and fish and honeybees. It must be, mustn't it, that I don't think seeing is a matter settled by experience (conscious experience--of the sort he finds obvious). He does see the way out: "being aware of colors does not require consciousness" [ms,p.6], but he can't see how this can be taken seriously. Why not? Because, I think, he is still committed to ordinary language philosophy. But vision, and color vision, can be, and routinely are, investigated in complete disregard of the ordinary senses of "aware" and "see" and "conscious". There is no doubt at all that honeybees have color vision; whether they are conscious in any interesting sense is quite another matter. 11. Blindsight in Nicholas Humphrey's monkey Helen is a particularly challenging case for Dretske (Humphrey, 1974, 1984). To put it with deliberate paradox, did Helen see--in Dretske's sense--in spite of her blindness? Humphrey and I once showed his film of Helen to a group of experts--psychologists and primatologists--at a meeting at Columbia University, and asked them if they could detect anything unusual about Helen, and if so what. For ten minutes they watched the film of Helen busily darting about in her space, picking up raisins and pieces of chocolate and eating them, avoiding obstacles, never making a false move or bumping into anything. Nobody suggested that there was anything wrong with her vision, but her entire primary visual cortex had been surgically removed. She was cortically blind. Would Dretske say that this was a case of epistemic seeing without non-epistemic seeing? 12. In fn. 19, Dretske mistakenly dismisses this as an avenue unworthy of my exploration--a measure of how much misunderstanding there has been between us. 13. This was also brought home to me by Hill, 1995, and the ensuing discussion. 14. What about real cases of peripheral paralysis? First, the only real cases have to be people who have lived an unparalyzed life for years--all other imaginable cases are cow-sharks, only logically possible and rudely dismissable. Second, the persistent integrity of the internal structures on which their continuing mental lives putatively depends is not a foregone conclusion. To the extent that the paralysis is truly just peripheral (unaccompanied by the atrophy of the internal), then, of course, such a sorry subject could go on living a mental life (as I imagined myself doing in the vat, in "Where am I?"). But all good things come to an end, and in the absence of normal amounts of "peripheral narrow behavior," mental life will surely soon fade away, leaving only historical traces of the vigorous aboutness its activities once exhibited. How long would it take? A gruesome empirical question, whose answer has no metaphysical significance. 15. If all these examples concern opinions, not beliefs, then why not just re-construe the theory of propositional attitudes as the theory of opinions? Because there could be no such theory--for the same reason there is not theory of things said: people say the darndest things. People can be got to say all manner of crazy things for all manner of weird reasons; the set of things they say, or would say under various provocations, is not a tidy set of phenomena for which one might reasonably aspire to provide a theory. The set of opinions is very much like--is scarcely distinct from--this set of things said. 16. Rorty has warned me that feminists will object to my use of the word "hysterical", but I am confident that few if any feminists would be so insensitive to irony as to overlook the recursion that would occur were they to object to my usage. It's a fine word, the only word we have for a real phenomenon, and it would be cretinous to denigrate it because of its ignoble etymology. 17. While he is at it, he might tell us how he would show that there is a fact of the matter about just when--i.e., to the day or week--the British Empire learned of the signing of the treaty ending the war of 1812. Is it determined by the dates and postmarks on the various documents, or by their time of arrival at various critical places, or by some combination of such factors? He had better not say that the question is meaningless, and hence has no proper answer--that would be raving superficialism about empires. 18. In spite of the gulf of disagreement, it is good to see that Rey joins me in giving the back of his hand to zombies and their ilk. The trouble I see with his way of doing it is that the qualophiles and zombists can complain, with some justice, that he is just changing the subject, redefining the problem out of existence. 19. 20. In heavy water, the heavy isotope of hydrogen, H2 or D, replaces the ordinary hydrogen atom. Heavy water is found in about 1 part per 5000 in ordinary water; it has slightly higher freezing and boiling temperatures than ordinary water, seeds can't germinate in it, and tadpoles can't live in it. XYZ must be more like H20 than deuterium oxide is, and deuterium oxide is a kind of water. 21. In "Beyond Belief," my example was the scientifically backward people who had a word for "gas" or perhaps "gaseous hydrocarbon"--surely a fine natural kind, but on this minimalist principle it would have to be translated "methane," since this is in fact the only gaseous hydrocarbon they have encountered. 22. Besides, it seems to me that if you renounce the neutrality of heterophenomenology, you make it systematically impossible to close the putative explanatory gap, because you give up ab initio on the goal of finding a rapprochement between the first and third person point of view. What shape could a closing of "the explanatory gap" take? It seems to me it would have to be an explanation that permitted one to tell a third-person, scientific story about subjectivity. I don't see how anything else would count as a closing of the gap. So far as I know, nobody has defended another framework. 23. "Outsmart, v. To embrace the conclusion of one's opponent's reductio ad absurdum argument. "They thought they have me, but I outsmarted them. I agreed that it was sometimes just to hang an innocent man." The Philosophical Lexicon, (Dennett, 1978b) 24. Rosenthal says at one point [p.17] that "it can happen that, even though one doesn't consciously see an object, one later recalls just where it was and what it looked like." I wonder what his evidence for this startling claim is. Wouldn't this be confounded with high-quality blindsight beyond anything yet reported in the literature? How would Rosenthal tell the two phenomena apart? 25. This is the illusion typically engendered by functionalistic "boxology" (CE, 270n, 358n). One defines a box in a flow chart in terms of the functional role anything entering it plays, and then forgets that if this is how "entrance" into that particular "box" is defined, it makes no sense to excuse an occupant of any of the defining powers. The boxes are not automatically salient tissues, organs, or separate media in the systems described, such that entrance into them can be distinguished independently of fulfilling the defining functional roles. 26. Robert Van Gulick correctly notes the strong tie between consciousness and reportability I have always endorsed. Since inability to report is in fact our most heavily relied upon grounds for presuming non-consciousness--in blindsight, for instance--when you loosen the tie to reportability, as Van Gulick suggests, you face the problem of motivation in a particularly severe form. 27. I am partly to blame, since I have myself often introduced Nagels' famous formula into the discussion, without being sufficiently explicit in announcing my rejection of its presuppositions. It is, I think, a chief source of this illusion of constancy of meaning in our questions about consciousness. 28. Wanting to obtain a hunk of alexandrite (to see for myself), I consulted a geologist friend, who provided the appropriate literature, including color photographs of this marvelous mineral--but no samples, sad to say. Alexandrite is rare, and consequently commands a price commensurate with other gem stones. 29. See also Dennett, 1993b, 1994b, where these ideas are developed further. 30. I am unmoved, then, by his advice to Churchland and me that we adopt a different strategy. I'm speaking for myself, and will not venture an opinion about Churchland's argument or McConnell's criticisms of it, since I don't rely on it. 31. At one point, Lorman says: "My retinal and other very early visual representations are as rich or richer in difficult-to-express information as the osprey experience, yet I can say exactly what it's like to have them: nothing!' [p.22.] Why does he think this is true? Presumably because he thinks that while "very early visual representations" are unconscious, some "late visual representations" are conscious. But this is a terrible model of consciousness. It is true that "later" cerebral effects (not necessarily representations) are necessary for one to become conscious of the contents of one's early visual representations, but when those normal effects are there, no "later" visual representation has to occur. So normally it is like something for us to have them.
What if Human Nature Is HistoricalThis essay moves from pure ideology about changing human nature to using biofeedback as a transitional topic to spelling out the desiderata for treating human nature as a historical project.
'What if Human Nature Is Historical' 116k. | Home - Human Nature Review | What's new | Search | Feedback | Amazon Products DISCOUNT Super Search Search Type Keyword Search Actor Search Director Search Band Artist Search Author Search ISBN Search UPC Search (CDs Only) Manufacturer Search Term Product Type Books ... Magazines All Movies ... DVD Only ... VHS Only CD Music Electronics ... Computers ... ... Software Toys Games ... Video Games Outdoor Living Kitchen Housewares Camera Photo Tools Hardware Baby The Writings of Professor Robert M. Young 'What if Human Nature Is Historical' 116k. At the end of the 1970s I wrote a series of speculative essays, 'Science Is Social Relations', 'How Societies Constitute Their Knowledge' and this one, probably the most exploratory. Other things, in particular, a series of television documentaries, took over my life, and I never published it or even knew where I might. So it has languished. I think only a couple of friends have seen it before its appearance on the web. However, although some of its rhetoric is dated, I still think well of it. It moves from pure ideology about changing human nature to using biofeedback as a tansitional topic to spelling out the desiderata for treating human nature as an historical project. I have left it in draft form and will provide detailed references if asked. Download View Online The Human Nature Review Ian Pitchford and Robert M. Young - Last updated: 06 August, 1998 08:43 AM | Human Nature | Books and Reviews | The Human Nature Daily Review | Search |
Malthus on Man - In Animals no Moral RestraintA paper was presented to a conference on 'Malthus, Medicine and Science' organised by Roy Porter at the Wellcome Institute, London, on 20 March 1998.
'Malthus on Man - In Animals no Moral Restraint' 59k | Home - Human Nature Review | What's new | Search | Feedback | Amazon Products DISCOUNT Super Search Search Type Keyword Search Actor Search Director Search Band Artist Search Author Search ISBN Search UPC Search (CDs Only) Manufacturer Search Term Product Type Books ... Magazines All Movies ... DVD Only ... VHS Only CD Music Electronics ... Computers ... ... Software Toys Games ... Video Games Outdoor Living Kitchen Housewares Camera Photo Tools Hardware Baby The Writings of Professor Robert M. Young 'Malthus on Man - In Animals no Moral Restraint' 59k Thirty years ago I wrote an article on the common context of biological and social theory, using Malthus as a key text and exploring how various writers had read him and had come up with very different conclusions: William Paley, Thomas Chalmers, Darwin, Wallace, Spencer, Marx and Engels. This article generated a number of commentaries and refutations, primarily seeking to disprove my conclusions about the connection between Darwin and Malthus and the role of Malthus in the origination of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. I have stood my ground and have argued that quite a lot hangs on the connection. On the occasion of the first invitation I have ever had to deliver a paper to a conference of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine (an ideologically and personally antagonistic director having been forcibly retired), I took the opportinity to reflect on this controversy, bring in some new evidence and draw philosophical conclusions about the role of praxis in human nature, as sanctioned by the first professional social scientist and the founder of modern evolutionary theory. I also urge modern Darwinians to emulate these eminent forbearers in granting a role for praxis in human nature. The paper was presented to a conference on 'Malthus, Medicine and Science' organised by Roy Porter at the Wellcome Institute, London, on 20 March 1998. Download View Online The Human Nature Review Ian Pitchford and Robert M. Young - Last updated: 02 November, 2000 07:39 AM | Human Nature | Books and Reviews | The Human Nature Daily Review | Search |
The Human Limits of Nature'The Limits of Human Nature' was the title of the London Institute of Contemporary Arts winter lecture series for 1971-72. The distinguished group of contributors, included Alan Ryan, Arthur Koestler, David Bohm, Raymond Williams and John Maynard Smith. This contribution was published in J. Benthall, ed., 'The Limits of Human Nature' (Allen Lane, 1973), pp. 235-74.
The Human Limits of Nature | Home - Robert M. Young | What's New | Search | Feedback | Guestbook | Contact Us | The Writings of Professor Robert M. Young 'The Human Limits of Nature'132K 'The Limits of Human Nature' was the title of the London Institute of Contemporary Arts winter lecture series for 1971-72. I was flattered to be among a distinguished group of contributors, including Alan Ryan, Arthur Koestler, David Bohm, Raymond Williams and John Maynard Smith. As my title implies, I did not agree with the terms of reference of the series, and my contribution was published in a separate section entitled 'Criticism'. 'Critique' would have been more accurate, since I was challenging the terms of reference of the series, as I spell out in my essay. This approach has been followed through in all my subsequent writings. It was published in J. Benthall, ed., The Limits of Human Nature (Allen Lane, 1973), pp. 235-74. Download View Online The Human Nature Review Ian Pitchford and Robert M. Young - Last updated: 10 March, 2002 03:07 PM | Human Nature | Books and Reviews | The Human Nature Daily Review | Search |
Humans and Other AnimalsHow much do we share with the birds of the air and the beasts of the field? Article by John Wilson at Christianity Today.
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CTDirect (daily) CTWeekly RSS Feed New Today A Peace Plan for the Gender War Nine Modest Tasks We Can Pursue Together Recent Stats on Working Parents, Divorce, and Missions Spending Film Forum: A Soaring Romance, a Flying House, a Derailed Marriage Weblog: Why Should Wall Street Have All the Good Companies? New This Week Home Christianity Today Magazine Columns Books Culture Corner Christianity Today, Week of August 28 Books Culture Corner: Humans and Other Animals How much do we share with the birds of the air and the beasts of the field? By John Wilson | posted 8 28 00 From Wednesday August 23 through Saturday August 26, some of the world's leading scholars of animal behavior gathered at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Center in Chicago for a multidisciplinary discussion of "Animal Social Complexity and Intelligence." The conference, presented by the Chicago Academy of Sciences in conjunction with the Living Links Center at Emory University and the Jane Goodall Institute, offered a state-of-the-art glimpse of a field that is producing results with profound implications for our understanding of ourselves and our place in the natural order. Jane Goodall herself was there, a charismatic presence and the center of media attention. The last day of the conference was devoted to her 40 years of work at Gombe, Tanzania, where her research with chimpanzees made her a familiar face throughout the world. Her appearance at the Chicago conference was one of a series of events between April 2000 and July 2001 in which she is making the case for increased awareness of the links between humans, other creatures, and the earth they share. The substance of the conference was to be found in the papers given by Frans de Waal, Meredith West, Jan van Hooff, and many other eminent scholars, with subjects ranging from Laurence Frank and Christine Drea's study of "Social Cognition and Cooperation in the Spotted Hyena" to Peter Tyack's "Dolphins Learn Individually Distinctive Whistles to Maintain Individual-Specific Social Relationships." And while such titles may suggest tedious fare that would appeal only to specialists, the lectures were for the most part not only quite accessible but frequently entertaining. It is impossible to hear a number of such papersreporting on research among various specieswithout reflecting on the commonalities between humans and other animals. Naturally that was a theme considered by many of the lecturers, though more often in the background than in the foreground. As the research programs presented here mature, the implications for an understanding of human behavior will be more emphatically addressedas indeed many scholars are already doing, under the rubric of evolutionary psychology, for example, without the modesty that was the keynote of the Chicago conference. For Christians the challenge will be twofold. On the one hand, we must fully acknowledge our kinship with other creatures. Theologians and philosophers such as Stephen Webb, Andrew Linzey, and Alasdair MacIntyreto name only three among manyare seeking to work out the implications of that imperative. At the same time, we must maintain the traditional understanding that there is a difference in kind (not merely in degree) between humans and all other creatures. It is easy to emphasize one of those truths at the expense of the other. So, for example, confidence in human "specialness" has all too often underwritten callous mistreatment of animals; and so, on the other hand, recognition of the "complexity" and "intelligence" of animals too often underwrites an explaining away of human distinctives. These are distortions, equally destructive and equally inadequate to the magnificently messy reality we inhabit: a reality that was richly on display last week in Chicago. John Wilson is Editor of Books Culture and Editor-at-Large for Christianity Today. Visit Books Culture online at BooksandCulture.com or subscribe here . animalsocialcomplexity.org gives more information about the conference, including abstracts of the papers presented there. See also the Web sites of the sponsors: the Jane Goodall Institute , Chicago Academy of Sciences , and Emory's Living Links . For more on animals and Christianity, see Stephen Webb's " Do All Good Dogs Go to Heaven? " which appeared in the January February 1999 issue of Books Culture, and Preston Jones's review of Webb's On God and Dogs . The review, " Lord of the Pets ," appeared in the September October 1998 issue of Books Culture. Media coverage of the Animal Social Complexity and Intelligence conference includes: Talk Like the Animals | Scientists Gather in Chicago to Discuss Animal IntelligenceReuters (Aug. 24, 2000) Goodall pleads for chimpanzees' future Chicago Sun-Times (Aug. 26, 2000) Changing the World | How Pioneer Jane Goodall Rewrote History Chicago Tribune (Aug. 25, 2000) Scientists Gather to Discuss Animal Intelligence Associated Press (Aug. 24, 2000) Animal Intelligence New Call of Wild Chicago Tribune (Aug. 22, 2000) The September 1999 issue of Dog Fancy magazine looked at the animal theology debate with a variety of religious leaders. Books Culture Corner appears Mondays at ChristianityToday.com. Earlier Books Culture Corners include: Cardinal Mahony's Baloney Sandwich | The public face of Catholic social teaching. (Aug. 21, 2000) In Praise of Miscegenation | Racial categories don't mean what they used to. Hallelujah. (Aug. 14, 2000) "Give 'Em Hell, Harry!" | Looking back at the 1948 presidential campaign. By Elizabeth Jacoway (Aug. 7, 2000) Roaring Lambs | The Evangelical Culture of Euphemism, Part 3. (July 31, 2000) The Evangelical Culture of Euphemism, Part 2 | Should we distinguish between public and private discourse? (July 24, 2000) The Culture of Euphemism | A dispatch from the Christian Booksellers Association convention. (July 17, 2000) Get Outta My Face! | The most troublesome word in religion today. By John Wilson (July 10, 2000) It Takes a Village to Raise a Child | But for an abortion, you only need a doctor and a nurse or two. 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Genes, culture and human freedomLike every other organism, humans are shaped by both nature and nurture. But unlike any other organism, we are defined by our ability to transcend both. Article by Kenan Malik.
spiked-science | Article | Genes, culture and human freedom Singer on 'speciesism': a specious argument by Helene Guldberg Sun, sea and saving the world by Jim Butcher Search for in All Sections central politics IT science liberties risk culture health life essays SECTIONS central politics IT science liberties risk culture health life essays ISSUES War on Iraq After 11 September spiked-proposals Global warming On animals Genetics Blood clots Mad cow panic Body parts Foot-and-mouth Food scares Go to: spiked-central spiked-science Article Article 20 March 2001 Printer-friendly version Email a friend Genes, culture and human freedom What it is to be human. by Kenan Malik 'Are humans the product of nature or nurture?' There are few questions that have produced more heated, but less illuminating, debates. Over the past half century there has been a fierce dispute as to whether human behaviour is determined by our genes or by our environment. In the decades following the Second World War, the experience of racial science, eugenics and the Holocaust led many scholars to denounce genetic theories of human behaviour and to insist on the importance of nurture in shaping who we are. More recently, disillusionment with social explanations, and advances in genetics and evolutionary biology, have helped swing the pendulum back towards theories that stress the importance of nature in the human make-up. The latest round in the nature-nurture debate took place in the wake of the publication in February 2001 of the first detailed analysis of the data from the human genome project. This suggested that human beings possess far fewer genes than previously thought; not the 100,000 genes that many had believed, but more like 30,000. We have a genome barely bigger than that of corn plant, and possess just 300 more genes than a mouse. There have been two responses to these findings. For some, the fact that the human genome appears different from that of lesser creatures seems to show that there is nothing particularly special about humans. 'It's humbling isn't it?', observed Ari Patrinos of the US Department of Energy, which funded much of the public genome research (1). But why should it be? Perhaps we should rather celebrate the fact that a creature with barely more genes than a cress plant can nevertheless unravel the complexities of its own genome. The second view is that the findings show that humans are more controlled by nurture than by nature - that they provide an argument for the existence of free will. 'We simply do not have enough genes for the idea of genetic determinism to be right', claimed Craig Venter, the founder of Celera, the private company which played a major part in the human genome project (2). An editorial in the UK Observer suggested that 'we are more free, it seems, than we had realised'. 'Politically', the editorial continued, the new research 'offers comfort for the left, with its belief in the potential of all, however deprived their background. But it is damning for the right, with its fondness for ruling classes and original sin' (3). Given that fruit flies possess half our number of genes, should we consider them twice as free as we are? A moment's reflection should reveal how unfounded is the argument that fewer genes means greater freedom. If it had turned out, for instance, that humans possessed 200,000 genes, would that have implied that we are slaves to our nature? And given that fruit flies possess half our number of genes, should we consider them to be twice as free as we are? That the UK Observer should seek political solace in the human genome says more about the desperate character of contemporary social thought than it does about the data emerging from the human genome project. There remains considerable controversy about the extent to which heredity influences human behaviour. But the argument for the importance of heredity has never rested on arguments about the number of genes we might possess. Rather, it has emerged largely from studies of identical twins. The interpretation of the data from such studies may leave much to be desired, but handwaving about numbers of genes will not make any difference to that data. The fact that humans have fewer genes than expected does not mean that we are governed more by nurture than by nature. Even if it did, however, it would not imply that humans are 'more free'. Being controlled by one's environment does not make one any freer than being controlled by one's genes. The problem with the nature-nurture debate is that this is an inadequate way of understanding human freedom. Like every other organism, humans are shaped by both nature and nurture. But unlike any other organism, we are also defined by our ability to transcend both, by our capacity to overcome the constraints imposed both by our genetic and our cultural heritage. It is not that human beings have floated free of the laws of causation. It is rather that humans are not simply the passive end result of a chain of causes, whether natural or environmental. We have developed the capacity to intervene actively in both nature and culture, to shape both to our will. To put this another way, humans, uniquely, are subjects as well as objects. We are biological beings, and under the purview of biological and physical laws. But we are also conscious beings with purpose and agency, traits the possession of which allow us to design ways of breaking the constraints of biological and physical laws. All non-human animals are constrained by the tools that nature has bequeathed them through natural selection, and by the environmental conditions in which they find themselves. No animal is capable of asking questions or generating problems that are irrelevant to its immediate circumstances or its evolutionarily designed needs. All animals have an evolutionary past. Only humans make history When a beaver builds a dam, it doesn't ask itself why it does so, or whether there is a better way of doing it. When a swallow flies south, it doesn't wonder why it is hotter in Africa or what would happen if it flew still further south. Humans do ask themselves these and many other kinds of questions - questions that have no relevance, indeed make little sense, in the context of evolved needs and goals. What marks out humans is our capacity to go beyond our naturally defined goals - such as the need to find food, shelter or a mate - and to establish human-created goals. Our evolutionary heritage certainly shapes the way that humans approach the world. But it does not limit it. Similarly, our cultural heritage influences the ways in which we think about the world and the kinds of questions we ask of it, but it does not imprison them. If membership of a particular culture absolutely shaped our worldview, then historical change would never be possible. If the people of medieval Europe had been totally determined by the worldview sustained by medieval European culture, it would not have been possible for that society to have become anything different. It would not have been possible, for instance, to have developed new ideas about individualism and materialism, or to have created new forms of technology and new political institutions. Human beings are not automata who simply respond blindly to whatever culture in which they find themselves, any more than they are automata that blindly respond to their evolutionary heritage. There is a tension between the way a culture shapes individuals within its purview and the way that those individuals respond to that culture, just as there is a tension between the way natural selection shapes the way that humans think about the world and the way that humans respond to our natural heritage. This tension allows people to think critically and imaginatively, and to look beyond a particular culture's horizons. In the six million years since the human and chimpanzee lines first diverged on either side of Africa's Great Rift Valley, the behaviour and lifestyles of chimpanzees have barely changed. Human behaviour and lifestyles clearly have. Humans have learned to learn from previous generations, to improve upon their work, and to establish a momentum to human life and culture that has taken us from cave art to quantum physics - and to the unravelling of the genome. It is this capacity for constant innovation that distinguishes humans from all other animals. All animals have an evolutionary past. Only humans make history. The historical, transformative quality of being human is why the so-called nature-nurture debate, while creating considerable friction, has thrown little light on what it means to be human. To understand human freedom we need to understand not so much whether we are creatures of nature or nurture, but how, despite being shaped by both nature and nurture, we are also able to transcend both. Kenan Malik is the author of Man, Beast and Zombie: What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us About Human Nature, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2000 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA) ); and The Meaning of Race: Race, History, and Culture in Western Society, New York University Press, 1996 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA) ). See his website (1) The Times , 13 February 2001 (2) Observer , 11 February 2001 (3) Observer, 11 February 2001 To respond to what you've read, send a letter by clicking here What is spiked? spiked is an online publication with the modest ambition of making history as well as reporting it. spiked stands for liberty, enlightenment, experimentation and excellence. Read on... Corrections Terms Conditions spiked, Signet House, 49-51 Farringdon Road, London, EC1M 3JP Email: info@spiked-online.com spiked 2000-2005 All rights reserved. spiked is not responsible for the content of any third-party websites.
How Hardwired Is Human Behavior?Abstract and electronic delivery of Nigel Nicholson's paper in the Harvard Business Review.
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The Darwin DebateThis essay appeared in Marxism Today 26 (no.4), April 1982, pp. 20-22.
The Darwin Debate | Home - Robert M. Young | What's New | Search | Feedback | Guestbook | Contact Us | The Writings of Professor Robert M. Young The Darwin Debate 33k 1982 was the centenary of Darwin's death, and everyone was (as they still are) claiming his legacy as the foundation of their particular world view. Marxists are particularly prone to do this, since there is a tradition of 'Scientific Marxism' stemming from the Second International to which the orthodox adhere, and Marx and Engels had a lot to say about Darwinism. I took this opportunity to write in a Communist Party periodical to say, somewhat mischievously, that socialists might have just as much in common with religious fundamentalists as they do with reductionist scientists, in that socialists are not wedded to fatalism in human affairs, something the religious claim, too. I also tried to show that there are a number of facets to the debate about humanity's place in nature and that one has to keep one's wits about one and not merely defer to scientists. The essay appeared in Marxism Today 26 (no.4), April 1982, pp. 20-22. Download View Online The Human Nature Review Ian Pitchford and Robert M. Young - Last updated: 06 August, 1998 08:44 AM | Human Nature | Books and Reviews | The Human Nature Daily Review | Search |
Herbert Spencer and Inevitable ProgressSpencer is so grandiose that it is hard to summarize his ideas, yet he was one of the most influential thinkers in nineteenth-century Britain, and his ideas were an inspiration around the world. His version of evolution was utterly generalised in all the ways Darwin tried to be circumspect. The organic analogies which Spencer developed are the foundation-stones for the widespread idea of functionalism across the biomedical and human sciences, extending to architecture, systems theory, cybernetics and information theory. The essay was reprinted in a collection from the journal: G. Marsden, ed., Victorian Values. Longman, 1990.
Herbert Spener and Inevitable Progress 50k | Home - Human Nature Review | What's new | Search | Feedback | Amazon Products DISCOUNT Super Search Search Type Keyword Search Actor Search Director Search Band Artist Search Author Search ISBN Search UPC Search (CDs Only) Manufacturer Search Term Product Type Books ... Magazines All Movies ... DVD Only ... VHS Only CD Music Electronics ... Computers ... ... Software Toys Games ... Video Games Outdoor Living Kitchen Housewares Camera Photo Tools Hardware Baby The Writings of Professor Robert M. Young Herbert Spener and Inevitable Progress 50k Spencer is so grandiose that it is hard to summarize his ideas, yet he was one of the most influential thinkers in nineteenth-century Britain, and his ideas were an inspiration around the world. His version of evolution was utterly generalised in all the ways Darwin tried to be circumspect. The organic analogies which Spencer developed are the foundation-stones for the widespread idea of functionalism across the biomedical and human sciences, extending to architecture, systems theory, cybernetics and information theory. I have written in detail about his ideas in many books and essays. An invitation from the editor of History Today led to this attempt briefly to circumscribe Spencer's work and impact. The essay was reprinted in a collection from the journal: G. Marsden, ed., Victorian Values. Longman, 1990. Download View Online The Human Nature Review Ian Pitchford and Robert M. Young - Last updated: 06 August, 1998 08:44 AM | Human Nature | Books and Reviews | The Human Nature Daily Review | Search |
Assault on EvolutionLarry Arnhart on the activities of "intelligent design theorists".
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Sound Off E-mail Salon Send us a Letter to the Editor Today's letters Downloads Get Salon.com on your PDA Salon.com headlines from My Netscape More ways to get Salon Assault on evolution The religious right takes its best scientific shot at Darwin with "intelligent design" theory. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Larry Arnhart Feb. 28, 2001 | The debate over teaching Darwinian biology in public schools has become the hottest battle in the culture war. The Darwinians cheered their victory on Feb. 14, when the Kansas Board of Education decided -- in a 7-3 vote -- to require the teaching of evolution in public schools across the state, thereby reversing a decision in August 1999 to remove evolution from the statewide guidelines for teaching and testing. But those Darwinians who think that in winning this battle they have won the war are mistaken. What really happened in Kansas is that the opponents of Darwinism tested a new intellectual weapon. As they become more skilled in the use of that weapon, the tide in this protracted battle could shift in their favor. The new weapon is called "intelligent design theory," or IDT. Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? By Jonathan Wells Regnery Publishing 307 pages Nonfiction Buy it Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution By Michael J. Behe Touchstone Books 307 pages Nonfiction Buy it Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science Theology By William A. Dembski and Michael J. Behe Intervarsity Press 302 pages Nonfiction Buy it Darwin on Trial By Phillip E. Johnson Intervarsity Press 220 pages Nonfiction Buy it Print story E-mail story Until recently, the critics of Darwinism have championed creationism -- the idea that a literal reading of the early chapters of the Bible offers a more accurate account of human origins than Darwinian biology does. The Darwinians have easily defeated this position by dismissing it as a religious belief unsupported by material evidence and inappropriate in science teaching. But now intelligent design theorists are claiming that scientific data show evidence in the living world for "irreducible complexity" or "specified complexity," which can only be explained as the work of an intelligent designer. Whether this cosmic designer corresponds to the biblical God, they admit, is a metaphysical or theological question that defies empirical science. Nevertheless, they argue, the observable evidence for design is scientifically compelling. Steve Abrams, a Kansas school board member who voted with the majority in 1999 and with the minority on Feb. 14, argued vigorously that teaching IDT as an alternative to Darwinism does not depend upon religious belief at all. After the Feb. 14 decision, Abrams insisted that intelligent design is based on "what is observable, measurable, testable, repeatable, falsifiable, good empirical science." The Discovery Institute, which identifies itself as "an intelligent design think tank" in Seattle, issued a press release condemning the decision in Kansas. Its spokesman, Mark Edwards, declared, "What is heralded as the triumph of science is instead a victory for censorship and viewpoint discrimination. This is not what science, or America, is about; discussion of the dissenting scientific opinion on Darwinism should be allowed in science classrooms." The Discovery Institute is led by conservative Republicans who promote IDT as a strategy for defeating what they regard as the immoral materialism of modern science. They hope to influence the new Bush administration. Their ultimate objective is to win a case before the U.S. Supreme Court that would uphold the constitutionality of teaching IDT in public school biology classes. The institute's legal strategy is laid out in a recent Utah Law Review article by David DeWolf and Stephen Meyer, who are associated with the organization. Over the past 20 years, the Supreme Court has said that teaching "creation science" in the public schools is an unconstitutional establishment of religion. But the court has also ruled that teaching alternative scientific theories of origins that challenge Darwinian biology is constitutional. And the court has said that when public schools create public forums for the free discussion of ideas, they must not practice "viewpoint discrimination" by suppressing ideas that might have some connection to religion. DeWolf and Meyer argue that unlike creation science, IDT rests on purely scientific evidence rather than biblical doctrine, and that therefore it represents a scientifically defensible alternative to Darwinism that can and should be taught in the public schools. And although some religious believers will see intelligent design as confirming their religion, DeWolf and Meyer explain, public schools that exclude the teaching of IDT because of this connection to religion are practicing the viewpoint discrimination prohibited by the Supreme Court. Next page | Real scientists who support IDT 1, 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 Photo illustration by Jennifer Ormerod Salon Don't get sunburned! Cover up with a Salon T-shirt this summer. Extra goodies and great services in Salon Plus Current Stories Why myths still matter The religious rituals that surrounded them are gone, but we're still drawn to stories that transform the world -- and ourselves. 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Behavioral inferences from the Skhul Qafzeh early modern human hand remainsThese results support the inference of significant behavioral differences between Neanderthals and the Skhul Qafzeh hominids and indicate that a significant shift in human manipulative behaviors was associated with the earliest stages of the emergence of modern humans.
Behavioral inferences from the Skhul Qafzeh early modern human hand remains -- Niewoehner, 10.1073 pnas.041588898 -- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Published online before print February 6, 2001, 10.1073 pnas.041588898 This Article Abstract Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to My File Cabinet Download to citation manager Cited by other online articles Request Copyright Permission Google Scholar Articles by Niewoehner, W. A. Articles citing this Article PubMed Articles by Niewoehner, W. A. Anthropology Behavioral inferences from the Skhul Qafzeh early modern human hand remains Wesley A. Niewoehner * Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131 Communicated by Erik Trinkaus, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, December 12,2000 (received for review October 4,2000) Abstract Top Abstract Introduction Neanderthal and Upper... Materials Methods Results Discussion References Two groups of humans are found in the Near East 100,000 years ago, the late archaic Neanderthals and the early modern Skhul Qafzeh humans. Observations that Neanderthals were more heavily muscled, had stronger upper-limb bones, and possessed unusual shapes and orientations of some upper-limb joint complexes relative to the Skhul Qafzeh hominids, have led some researchers to conclude that significant between-group upper-limb-related behavioral differences must have been present, despite the association of the two groups with similar Middle Paleolithic archeological complexes. A three-dimensional morphometric analysis of the hand remains of the Skhul Qafzeh hominids, Neanderthals, early and late Upper Paleolithic humans, and Holocene humans supports the dichotomy. The Skhul Qafzeh carpometacarpal remains do not have any unique morphologies relative to the other fossil samples remains examined. However, in the functionally significant metacarpal 1and 3bases they resemble Upper Paleolithic humans, not Neanderthals. Furthermore, the Skhul Qafzeh sample differs significantly from the Neanderthals in many other aspects of hand functional anatomy. Given the correlations between changes in tool technologies and functional adaptations seen in the hands of Upper Paleolithic humans, it is concluded that the Skhul Qafzeh hand remains were adapted to Upper Paleolithic-like manipulative repertoires. These results support the inference of significant behavioral differences between Neanderthals and the Skhul Qafzeh hominids and indicate that a significant shift in human manipulative behaviors was associated with the earliest stages of the emergence of modern humans. Introduction Top Abstract Introduction Neanderthal and Upper... Materials Methods Results Discussion References The Near Eastern human fossil and archeological records present a unique paleoanthropological situation because two morphologically distinct but archeologically very similar human groups, the late archaic Neanderthals and the early modern Skhul Qafzeh hominids, existed at approximately the same time. Near Eastern Neanderthals are known from a number of 50,000-to 120,000-year-old sites in Israel, Syria, and Iraq ( 1-4 ). Neanderthals were craniofacially distinct, highly active, and comparatively very muscular. The fossil remains from the 80,000- to 100,000-year-old site of Skhul ( 5 ) and the 100,000-year-old site of Qafzeh ( 1 , 2 ), both in Israel, are craniofacially more modern and less muscular than Neanderthals. Both groups are associated with Middle Paleolithic archeological complexes ( 6-9 ), indicating they used typologically and technologically similar toolkits for their subsistence activities. Functional analyses of their skeletal remains demonstrate that the Skhul Qafzeh sample had reduced upper-limb muscularity, reduced mechanical advantages in the hand, and reduced resistance to bending forces in the upper arm compared with the Neanderthals ( 10-16 ). These hominids appear to have used less somatic effort to accomplish upper-limb-related subsistence tasks than did the Neanderthals. Thus far, the anatomical evidence supports the hypothesis of significant behavioral contrasts between these two Near Eastern hominid groups, even though there is currently no archeological evidence supporting upper-limb-related behavioral distinctions ( 12 , 13 , 17 ). Our understanding of late Pleistocene human biocultural evolution will continue to be significantly hampered until these paradoxical lines of evidence are resolved. This research on hand functional anatomy was undertaken to elucidate further the nature of the morphological and functional affinities of the Skhul Qafzeh carpometacarpal (CMC) remains relative to Neanderthal, Upper Paleolithic early modern, and recent Holocene human samples. The orientations and shapes of the CMC articulations are adaptations to the levels and trajectories of forces produced during manipulation, and between-sample differences in CMC functional anatomy are informative of frequency shifts in habitual manipulatory behaviors ( 18 , 19 ). Because the Skhul Qafzeh sample is the earliest well-dated and reasonably complete sample of early modern humans known, elucidation of both their manual anatomy and upper-limb-related behavioral repertoires may have profound implications for the evolution of human manipulative behaviors associated with the emergence of behaviorally modern humans. Neanderthal and Upper Paleolithic Human Hand Functional Anatomy Top Abstract Introduction Neanderthal and Upper... Materials Methods Results Discussion References Many researchers (e.g., refs. 20-25 ) have argued that the Neanderthals had limited manipulative capabilities. This idea was based largely on the mistaken belief that Neanderthals had relatively short thumbs, unusual thumb muscle morphology, and limited thumb mobility compared with recent humans. It is now clear that the Neanderthals had manipulative capabilities similar to those of modern humans, even though their hand remains have combinations of features that are at or beyond the range of recent human morphological variation ( 3 , 18 , 19 , 26 , 27 ). These include osteological indications of unusually hypertrophied hand musculature, significantly increased mechanical advantages across many joints, unusually broad fingertips, and unusual shapes and orientations of some of their CMC joints. The first three features indicate that the Neanderthal hand was adapted primarily for greater grip strength during opposition and flexion of the thumb, cupping of the palm, and many wrist and hand movements relative to recent humans. All of these features contribute to the production of power grips, those in which objects are held in the palm of the hand with the thumb serving as a brace, implying that the Neanderthal manipulatory repertoire habitually required greater power compared with late Pleistocene early modern human manipulative repertoires. This is not to say that the Neanderthals did not, or could not, use precision grips, those in which the tip of the thumb is brought into contact with the pads of the fingers, inasmuch as there are no morphological indications of limited joint movements ( 3 , 10 , 18 , 19 , 26 , 28 ). More importantly, Neanderthals may have engaged in significantly altered frequencies of upper-limb behaviors relative to ethnohistorically documented hunter-gatherers, because mounting evidence from upper-limb articular morphology (including their CMC joints) indicates that the Neanderthals habitually loaded their joints not only at higher levels of joint reaction force, but also in different distributions of articular positions during peak loading ( 3 , 14 , 18 , 19 , 23 , 28-31 ). Within the CMC region, the Neanderthal metacarpal (MC) 1base tends to be dorsopalmarly flat to convex, lacking the prominent palmar beak typical of most recent human MC 1bases. The Neanderthal morphology is probably an adaptation to the transmission of large axial loads ( 3 ). Compared with recent humans, the Neanderthal mid-CMC region is not as well adapted for resisting oblique joint reaction forces. Neanderthals have capitate-to-MC 2and capitate-to-MC 3articulations that tend to have reduced MC 3styloid process projection and parasagittally rather than obliquely oriented MC 2capitate facets ( 18 , 19 , 26 ). Despite archeological evidence for occasional hafting of Neanderthal-associated Middle Paleolithic tools ( 32-35 ), the above suite of features indicates that the Neanderthals probably did not use hafted tools that required the habitual use of oblique power grips. It may well be that an emphasis on woodworking, either with hand-held stone flakes or with flakes hafted into the distal rather than lateral aspects of handles, which were then held transversely across the palm of the hand, could account for many unique aspects of Neanderthal hand functional anatomy. Interestingly, some early Upper Paleolithic (EUP) early modern human CMC functional complexes are morphologically and functionally intermediate between Neanderthal and recent Holocene human samples. Of special note is the fact that EUP and Neanderthal thumb CMC articulations are similar; both tend to have dorsopalmarly flat rather than concave MC 1bases, although marginally greater development of the palmar beak is evident in EUP humans. Evidently, EUP humans and Neanderthals shared manipulatory behaviors that produced roughly similar levels of axial loads at the base of the thumb. However, both late Upper Paleolithic (LUP) and recent human MC1 bases are almost invariantly dorsopalmarly concave, indicating reduced load levels at the base of the thumb. Relative to Neanderthals, both EUP and LUP MC 3bases have increased concavity of the facet for the MC 2base, permitting enhanced pronation of the MC 2.This enhanced pronation is accompanied by slightly increased proximal projection of the MC 3styloid process, but not to the extreme degree found in recent human samples. Additionally, whereas the Neanderthal MC 2base is adapted for the transmission of primarily axially directed joint reaction forces, EUP MC 2and 3bases (given increased projection of their styloid process) are both adapted for increased oblique loads. These adaptations are more apparent in LUP specimens and are fully developed in recent human samples. Despite the presence of intermediate articular configurations, there are significant reductions in mechanical advantages on both the radial and ulnar sides of the hand of both EUP and LUP humans compared with Neanderthals when hamulus and trapezium tubercle projections are used to estimate muscle moment arms. Additionally, neither EUP nor LUP specimens have Neanderthal-like broad fingertips ( 19 , 36 ). In sum, when compared with the Neanderthals, the changes in EUP and LUP hand functional complexes often involved subtle alterations in joint shapes and orientations, whereas changes in joint mechanical advantages were more dramatic. The cumulative effects are increased stabilization of the mid-CMC region, the enhancement of first finger precision movements, and reductions in muscularity and mechanical advantages, all of which follow closely on the European Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic technological transition that began 40,000 B.P. The previously mentioned adaptive changes in the MC2 3 bases that stabilize the mid-CMC region are likely related to gradual increases in the frequency and sophistication of hafted tools used during the Upper Paleolithic, whereas functional adaptations related to more frequent precision grip usage, such as enhanced MC 2pronation, are probably related to finer finger movements required for the engraving and incising of bone and antler artifacts. Given this robust pattern of associated morphological and technological behavioral evolution, the research question is therefore to determine where the Skhul Qafzeh sample fits into this morphological continuum. The analysis is designed to test whether traditionally defined stone tool complexes are associated with specific CMC morphologies. Given their combined association with Middle Paleolithic lithic assemblages, the Skhul Qafzeh hominids and Neanderthals should be most similar to each other. Such a result would weaken the hypothesis of between-sample behavioral distinctions. Alternatively, a finding that the Skhul Qafzeh hominids are non-Neanderthal-like would lend further support to the behavioral distinction hypothesis. Materials Top Abstract Introduction Neanderthal and Upper... Materials Methods Results Discussion References The trapezia, capitates, hamates, and MCs 1,3,and 5from late Pleistocene and recent Holocene humans are used in this analysis. The primary concern for including specific skeletal elements is the presence of well-preserved, undistorted, and osteoarthritis-free articular facets. Data were collected on most of the available original late Pleistocene fossil hand remains. High-quality resin casts were used when original specimens were unavailable. The fossil specimens are divided into four samples: Neanderthals from Europe and the Near East, early and late Upper Paleolithic humans, and the Skhul Qafzeh hominids. The Neanderthal sample consists of six European and seven Near Eastern individuals. Not all hand skeletons are complete; the sample size for each analysis varies from five to eight. The Upper Paleolithic specimens are associated with "nontransitional" industries, i.e., Aurignacian, Gravettian, Magdalenian, Epigravettian, and Kebaran. The sample is subdivided into the EUP (before 20,000years ago) and LUP (after 20,000years ago). The EUP sample consists of 12individuals, and the LUP sample has nine. The actual number of specimens in each analysis varies from three to eight; the average EUP sample size is six, and the average LUP sample size is five. The Skhul Qafzeh sample consists of Skhul 5and Qafzeh 3,7,8,and 9.This sample has the least complete hand skeletons, so only 1-2 individuals are included in each analysis. All fossil specimens except the EUP-associated Arene Candide 1,an approximately 15-year-old male ( 37 ), are skeletally mature. Comparative data also were collected on three Holocene human samples to maximize between-sample differences in articular size, population activity level, and indicators of hand muscularity. These were subsequently pooled into recent males (n=15-19) and females (n=15-18) for the analysis. The North American Urban sample, representing a relatively sedentary mid-20th century population, was taken from an autopsied skeletal collection of primarily European individuals. The late prehistoric Amerindian sample, A.D. 1,250 to 1,600,consists of individuals from Pueblo IV sites located in New Mexico's central Rio Grande Valley. They have moderate levels of humeral and MC robusticity and upper-limb and hand muscularity ( 14 , 18 ). The Mistihalj sample is from a Yugoslavian Medieval cemetery. These individuals exhibit rugose muscle markings and have large joint surfaces. Sexes were recorded from osteological inventory forms and rechecked by standard pelvic and cranial sexing techniques ( 38-40 ). Recent human male female ratios are approximately equal, and given the potential systematic bias in between-sample differences in joint morphology introduced by functional adaptations to handedness, equal numbers of right and left sides are used. Methods Top Abstract Introduction Neanderthal and Upper... Materials Methods Results Discussion References The raw data are three-dimensional landmark coordinates of the MC 1,3,and 5bases and the MC facets on the trapezium, capitate, and hamate. Landmark coordinate data were acquired with photogrammetry, the extraction of three-dimensional information from digitized photographs. First, a 1010grid that covers the maximum radioulnar and dorsopalmar extents of the facet is projected on each articular surface with a slide projector (Fig. 1 ). The specimen is then photographed from three or more angles with a calibrated 35-mm camera with a 1:1 90-mm macro lens, and the film negatives are scanned for use in a computer photogrammetry program, PHOTOMODELER ( 41 ). After the gridline intersections (the landmarks) are digitized on each image, the program calculates each landmark's three-dimensional coordinates to 0.023 mm. View larger version (62K): [in this window] [in a new window] Fig. 1. Examples of grids projected on various recent human MC 1,3,and 5bases (A-C) and trapezium, capitate, and hamate MC facets (D-F). The landmarks are the digitized gridline intersections. Landmark coordinates are used in the MORPHOLOGIKA computer software program ( 42 ). It first performs a separate Procrustes superimposition of the combined sample landmark coordinates for each MC base or carpal facet, fixing all objects to the same centroid size (size=1). It fixes the objects without changing the shapes, so it fixes only isometric shape differences ( 43 , 44 ). This step is followed by separate principal components analysis of Kendall's tangent space coordinates ( 45 ), which summarizes the total sample shape variance for each MC base or carpal facet. Shape variation associated with the principal components is visualized in the program by "morphing" the three-dimensional rendered wire frame of the Procrustes mean MC base or carpal facet shape (Fig. 2 ). View larger version (24K): [in this window] [in a new window] Fig. 2. Examples of wire frames of the CMC facets visualized with the MORPHOLOGIKA software. The range of shape variation along some of the principal components (PC) of shape that contribute significantly to discriminating Neanderthals from recent humans is illustrated in the morphing of the combined sample Procrustes mean facet shapes: the MC 3base (1A-1C), the MC 1base (2A-2C), and the distal capitate facets (3A-3C). Neanderthals tend to have less styloid projection, flat to convex MC 1bases, and more parasagittally oriented capitate MC 2facets. Specimens are next assigned an a priori class (i.e., Neanderthal, EUP, LUP, or recent human male or female), and their principal components scores derived from the Morphologika program are used to produce a separate canonical discriminant function for each MC base or carpal facet with SAS statistical software ( 46 ). Only those functions with significant discriminations (P 0.05) are discussed in the results. The Skhul Qafzeh specimens are inserted into the discriminant functions as unknowns and assigned to the nearest class based on the discriminant function Mahalanobis distance matrix. The results are indicative of morphological resemblance, and they form the basis for the functional and behavioral inferences discussed later. Results Top Abstract Introduction Neanderthal and Upper... Materials Methods Results Discussion References The discriminant function classification results are presented in Table 1 and Fig. 3 , and the posterior probabilities of membership in the a priori classes are listed in Table 2 . Qafzeh 9's hamate-MC4 5 facets are morphologically most similar to the recent human female sample. The Qafzeh 9MC 5base and the capitate-MC 2 3 facets have high probabilities (0.70and 0.85) of belonging to the Neanderthal sample, whereas the trapezium facet on the MC 1base and the matching facet on the trapezium, plus the MC 3base, are all classified as EUP or LUP with probabilities of 0.28, 0.99, and 0.92,respectively. The Qafzeh 3capitate is placed in the Neanderthal sample with a relatively high probability of 0.71.The remaining specimens are classified as EUP (Qafzeh 3's hamate and Qafzeh 8's MC 3base) or LUP (Skhul 5's MC 1base and Qafzeh 7's trapezium) with moderate to high probabilities of 0.41,0.77,0.71,and 0.42. View this table: [in this window] [in a new window] Table 1. Classification results for the Skhul Qafzeh specimens View larger version (12K): [in this window] [in a new window] Fig. 3. Plots of the CMC facet canonical discriminant functions. The class means are plotted on the first two canonical axes for the MC 1base, MC 3base, MC 5base, and the trapezium, capitate, and hamate MC facets. View this table: [in this window] [in a new window] Table 2. Posterior probabilities of membership in classes for Skhul Qafzeh specimens Discussion Top Abstract Introduction Neanderthal and Upper... Materials Methods Results Discussion References Given their geological age, it is not surprising that the Skhul Qafzeh CMC remains are most often assigned to one of the late Pleistocene fossil samples rather than the recent human sample. The most complete specimen, Qafzeh 9,bears morphological affinities to Neanderthals, EUP, LUP, or recent humans, depending on the CMC articulation in question. However, not all between-sample CMC morphological contrasts are equally distinctive, nor do all articular complexes have equal functional significance. The regions with the greatest between-sample discriminatory power, the MC 1,MC 2,and MC 3bases ( 18 , 19 ), are also functionally important complexes. Two of these regions were examined in this analysis. All Skhul Qafzeh MC 1and MC 3bases are most similar to either the EUP or LUP sample morphologies, indicating UP-like levels of increased resistance to oblique joint reaction forces and enhanced MC 2pronation. Thus, although of interest, less weight must be attributed to the result that the Qafzeh 3and 9capitate-MC 2 3 facets and the Qafzeh 9MC 5bases are classified as Neanderthal-like. Clearly, with the prominent exception of the Skhul Qafzeh sample, between-sample contrasts in functionally relevant CMC morphological patterns are associated with traditionally defined lithic assemblages. One is therefore forced to conclude from this one exception that either between-sample differences in hand functional complexes are not informative of habitual behavioral repertoires, or the standard lithic typological categories are capable of discerning large-scale behavioral shifts but are sometimes inadequate for identifying more subtle, yet significant, differences in behavior. This analysis indicates that the latter is more likely than the former. Additional consideration must be given to the fact that the functional anatomy of the rest of the Skhul Qafzeh hand remains are more similar to Upper Paleolithic rather than Neanderthal samples. For example, the Skhul Qafzeh sample, like both EUP and LUP samples, has reduced muscle mechanical advantages at the base of the thumb and on the ulnar and radial sides of the wrist, relative to Neanderthals. Other significant similarities with EUP and LUP samples that contrast with Neanderthals include reductions in the development of muscle crests and fingertip widths ( 19 ). These features, plus the results just presented, demonstrate that the Skhul Qafzeh and Neanderthal samples are distinct from each other in the most functionally significant regions of the hand and that the Skhul Qafzeh hand remains are morphologically and functionally within the range of the combined EUP LUP samples. A recent review of the Middle Paleolithic to Upper Paleolithic archeological transition in Europe emphasizes the complex nature of the behavioral and technological transition ( 47 ). Nevertheless, the significant correlations between the evolution of the hand and the technological and behavioral changes occurring during the Upper Paleolithic of Europe cannot be ignored. These correlations indicate that hand functional anatomy may be used as a primary indicator of frequency shifts in habitual manipulatory repertoires, because habitual activities affect local rates of bone modeling and remodeling ( 48 , 49 ). Because the Skhul Qafzeh hands are morphologically and functionally like Upper Paleolithic samples, one must logically conclude that the Skhul Qafzeh hominids habitually engaged in significantly more Upper Paleolithic-like rather than Neanderthal-like upper limb behaviors, regardless of the archeological evidence to the contrary. The apparent equivalence of the Skhul Qafzeh and Neanderthal associated lithic assemblages may be a function of the use of traditional typological methodologies, which, as made clear by the recent attempt of Shea ( 50 ) to document behavioral variability among the Levantine Neanderthal and Skhul Qafzeh groups, cannot always discern subtle behavioral variation. Given the patterns of between-sample morphological and functional similarities discovered in this analysis, the Skhul Qafzeh hominids were most likely using oblique grips and finer finger movements more frequently than were the Neanderthals. Notably, the skeletal evidence presented here, in the context of late Pleistocene patterns of modern human emergence, indicates that significant shifts in habitual manipulative behavior were associated with the early emergence of modern humans. Such behavioral shifts may well have been one of the primary components of the subsequent spread of early modern humans. Acknowledgements I thank the numerous curators for their generosity in granting access to the collections and fossil specimens used in this research. Data collection and analysis were supported by grants from the L.S.B.Leakey Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the University of New Mexico. Abbreviations CMC, carpometacarpal; MC, metacarpal; EUP, early Upper Paleolithic; LUP, late Upper Paleolithic. Footnotes * E-mail: wesn{at}unm.edu . Article published online before print: Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 10.1073 pnas.041588898. Article and publication date are at www.pnas.org cgi doi 10.1073 pnas.041588898 References Top Abstract Introduction Neanderthal and Upper... Materials Methods Results Discussion References 1. Grn, R. Stringer, C. B. (1991) Archaeometry 33, 153-199 . 2. Valladas, H. , Joron, J.-L. , Valladas, G. , Arensburg, B. , Bar-Yosef, O. , Belfer-Cohen, A. , Goldberg, P. , Laville, H. , Meignen, L. , Rak, Y. , et al. (1987) Nature (London) 330, 159-160 . 3. Trinkaus, E. (1983) The Shanidar Neanderthals (Academic, New York). 4. Trinkaus, E. (1991) L'Anthropol. (Paris) 95, 535-572 . 5. McDermott, F. , Grn, R. , Stringer, C. B. Hawkesworth, C. J. (1993) Nature (London) 363, 252-255 [Medline] . 6. Mercier, N. 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Behavior and the General Evolutionary ProcessPaper by William Baum.
Behavior and the General Evolutionary Process Behavior and the General Evolutionary Process William M. Baum Department of Psychology, University of New Hampshire, and Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California, Davis Submission to Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Draft: Do not cite or quote without the authors permission. (Word count = 12,529) Mailing address: William M. Baum 611 Mason, 504 San Francisco, CA 94108 Electronic mail: Wm.baum@unh.edu or wmbaum@ucdavis.edu Short Abstract The resemblance among operant shaping, cultural evolution, and genetic evolution appears clearly only in the light of a general concept of evolutionary process. Every evolutionary process consists of three elements: variation, recurrence, and selection. Although the metaphor of copying characterizes recurrence in genetic evolution, replication is only one type of recurrence. Selection occurs when recurrence is differential. Differences in environmental effects produce differences in recurrence, and those differences feed back to affect the composition of the pool of variants. The three evolutionary processes may be seen as nested: cultural evolution within genetic evolution, and operant evolution within cultural evolution. (end of abstract; word count = 99) Long Abstract Behavior analysis is properly part of evolutionary biology, because only evolutionary theory can explain the origins of behavior and because behavior analysis follows the same mode of explanation as evolutionary theory. The resemblance among operant shaping, cultural evolution, and genetic evolution appears clearly only in the light of a general concept of evolutionary process. Every evolutionary process consists of three elements: variation, recurrence, and selection. Evolutionarily significant variation occurs among substitutable variants within a pool. These variants are defined by differences in their environmental effects. Although the metaphor of copying characterizes recurrence in genetic evolution, replication is only one type of recurrence. In cultural and operant evolution, mechanisms like stimulus control and induction cause the recurrence of the variants. Selection occurs when recurrence is differential. Differences in environmental effects produce differences in recurrence, and those differences feed back to affect the composition of the pool of variants. This general view of evolutionary process clarifies the distinction between proximate and ultimate explanations of behavior. Genetic, cultural, and operant evolution all admit of this distinction, because they all distinguish advantageous mechanisms from a history of advantage. Proximate explanations deal with the expression of variants, whereas ultimate explanations deal with the feedback from environmental effects to the frequencies of variants in the pool. The three evolutionary processes may be seen as nested: cultural evolution within genetic evolution, and operant evolution within cultural evolution. A complete understanding of human behavior requires constructing six types of explanation: proximate and ultimate explanations in all three processes. (end of abstract; word count = 250) Key words: evolution, general evolutionary process, cultural evolution, operant behavior, substitutable variant, proximate explanation, ultimate explanation, nested processes The science of behavior, or behavior analysis, is properly part of evolutionary biology. It is intimately tied to evolutionary theory in two fundamental ways. First, evolution is the explanation of why behavior and behavioral processes exist at all. It is the only way to understand the peculiarities and constraints that characterize matters like classical and operant conditioning. Second, behavioral explanations follow the same mode of explanation as do evolutionary explanations. Skinner (1981) called it selection by consequences. It may also be called historical explanation (Baum Heath, 1992). Several writers have suggested that operant conditioning, or shaping, may be seen as parallel to natural selection. Donahoe (1999) suggests that even Thorndike may have recognized the resemblance between the law of effect and natural selection. Skinner (1953; 1981) stated it overtly and made it the centerpiece to his view of behavior (Ringen, 1999). Gilbert (1970) drew out the parallel at length, and Staddon Simmelhag (1971; Staddon, 1973) enlarged on it by distinguishing between principles of variationi.e., those processes that give rise to behavioral variantsand principles of selectionthose processes that cause selection among behavioral variants. The parallel, however, is of more than casual interest; it represents a revolution in thought. A. POPULATION THINKING The importance of selection and history has been under-appreciated in the study of behavior within the traditions of psychology. One reason is that psychology, like other sciences, was influenced by philosophical views in which the world is thought to be composed of ideal types into which all particulars may be classified. In biology, typological thinking affected the concept of species. In psychology, typological thinking affected the concept of response, the unit of behavior. In biology, typological thinking eventually gave way to population thinking, which is the cornerstone of evolutionary theory and all selectionist theories. The difference between the two ways of thinking may be seen in their views on variation. In typological thinking, variation is error and dealt with as a nuisance to be eliminated by averaging. In population thinking, variation is central, and averaging is only an analytic convenience. As Ernst Mayr (1959) wrote, For the typologist, the type (eidos) is real and the variation an illusion, while for the populationist the type (average) is an abstraction and only the variation is real (p. 2). Arguably, Skinners greatest contribution to the study of behavior was his rejection of the typological view of behavioral units (responses). Mayr (1970) observed, The replacement of typological thinking by population thinking is perhaps the greatest conceptual revolution that has taken place in biology (p. 5). The same may be said of the (ongoing) revolution in the study of behavior. Population thinking means the appreciation of populations as units of evolutionary change. Evolutionary theory would be impossible without it. Darwin explained the origin of species by conceiving of species as comprised of populations that change across generations. The idea of change in the composition of a population allowed evolution to be explained as descent with modification, the result of variation with consequences for reproductive success. The explanation of behavior as an outcome of selection by consequences similarly requires thinking about behavior as comprised of populations (Glenn, Ellis, Greenspoon, 1992). Only if behavioral change is seen as change in the composition of a behavioral population, may it be explained as descent with modification. To have explanatory power, however, descent with modification or selection by consequences requires identification of an evolutionary process. Plausibility requires construction of specific explanations, which require specific mechanisms (Hull, 1988). B. EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS An evolutionary process includes three basic elements: variation, recurrence, and selection. Each is necessary, and together they suffice to ensure evolutionary change (i.e., descent with modification). B.1. Variation Variation occurs within a population or pool. A population of mice may be conceived of as a pool of genes, each mouse containing a set of genes, but because of recombination, a pool sufficiently fluid that the individual mice may often be ignored for purposes of explaining change within the population. Within the pool, different genes have different effects. Some influence coat color, some lung capacity, others the structure of the brain. The key variation within any such pool is the variation among units that affect the same trait but produce different phenotypic effectsfor example, that influence coat color but cause coat color to be dark or light. Evolutionary change depends on the existence of substitutable variants. In genetic evolution, such substitutable variants are referred to as alleles. They are substitutable in the sense that one allele may replace another, and they are mutually exclusive in the sense that such replacement is all or none. Evolutionary change consists of change in the relative frequencies of substitutable variants within the pool or population. B.1.1. Functional definition The units within the pool are defined, not by their structure, but by their functionthat is, by their effects. In genetic evolution, the question arises as to how to break the genome into the constituent units that influence phenotype (Dawkins, 1989a). Although DNA has structure, one cannot tell which pieces should be called genes just by examining the structure. According to Dawkins (1989b), a gene must have three properties: fidelity (faithful copying), longevity (long enough lifetime to be copied), and fecundity (frequent copying). The units that possess these properties, however, may be small or large pieces of DNA, may be contiguous in a chromosome or not, may even be in different chromosomes, and may even be in different organisms [as in Dawkinss example of parasites affecting phenotypic traits in hosts (Dawkins, 1989a and b)]. Whatever pieces of DNA act in concert to produce the phenotypic effect and may be said to be faithfully copied, to endure well enough to be copied, and to be frequently copied constitute the gene. The alleles compete because they differ in fidelity, longevity, or fecundity. A degree of copying fidelity may be assumed, because it is necessary for transmission. Differences in longevity and fecundity, however, result from differences in the alleles phenotypic effects. A darker coat color may increase its possessors likelihood of surviving long enough to reproduce. Phenotypic effects, though often thought of in terms of morphology, are better seen as effects on the environment (Dawkins, 1989a). A darker coat color affects the ability of predators to detect a mouse against the ground. All phenotypic effects are environmental effects, because they facilitate exploitation of resources, survival, or reproduction. The point becomes clearer if we focus on genetic effects on behavior. Building a better nest alters the environment of the nestlings. Dawkins uses the example of the beavers dam construction, which creates the beaver pond, which reduces risk of predation and has a host of other good effects on the beavers environment. This focus on function, in the form of environmental effects, solves what would otherwise be an intractable problem: how to define genes. In a broader view of selection by consequences, it solves the problem of defining the substitutable variants within the pool of variants. The same problem of defining units arises in cultural evolution and in the shaping of operant behavior, both of which constitute evolutionary processes. As a focus on the structure of DNA offers little guidance about the definition of genes, so the structure of cultural practices and operant responses tells little about how they should be defined. Not that structure is totally irrelevant; in all three processes, structure constrains the definitions. DNA sequences specify the ordering of strings of amino acids, different configurations coding for different amino acids. Cultural practices and operant responses divide along what Skinner (1938) called natural lines of fracture (p. 33), constrained by anatomy and arrangements in the nervous system. As the codons of DNA represent natural lines of fracture and specify minimal units that may be aggregated into genes, so fixed-action patterns and the structure of bones and muscles constrain what may be aggregated into the substitutable variants of culture and operant behavior (Skinner, 1969). The making of a pot comprises motions of the fingers and hands, but only those motions that the structure of the fingers and hands allows. The physical motions, however, are little help when it comes to defining the evolutionary unit. That will be the making of a certain kind of pot, and the substitutable variants will be the making of other kinds of pot, some of which may leak less, may be easier to handle, or may serve a social function by virtue of design. These variants compete within the culture pool, just as alleles compete within the gene pool. All three unitsgenes, cultural practices, and operant patternsare defined in terms of environmental effects. All three are defined by what they accomplish in the world with which they make contact. Dawkins (1989a) made this clear about genes in his discussion of extended phenotype. Guerin (1997) clarified the point for cultural practices when he argued that the functional unit of culture is getting a job done. Every culture comprises jobs that must get done. At the most general level, the jobs might be reproduction, obtaining resources, protection from weather and enemies, and maintaining group cohesion. These general jobs subsume more specific jobs, such as child rearing, transport, and ownership. Whatever the level of generality that suits the analysis of culture, the substitutable variants will be different ways of getting the same job done. Different ways of raising children, of transporting oneself and goods, or of demonstrating group membership may compete with one another and may differ in their outcomes. Skinner (1938; 1953; 1957) explicitly defined operant responses according to their environmental effects. One might say, following Guerin, that the rats lever press gets a job done. Although depression of a lever constitutes a discrete unit of behavior, more global patterns produce more global effects. In the laboratory, several presses may be required for reinforcement, constituting a larger unit. In the everyday world, global accomplishments always entail more specific accomplishments. Helping an unhappy customer entails listening to the complaint, making suggestions, talking to suppliers, and so on. Making a living might entail finding a job, going to work every day, specifying ones duties, and so on. Giving directions entails various utterancesstatements about location, queries, and descriptions of action. Different ways of helping the customer, of making a living, or of giving directions constitute substitutable variants that may compete and may differ in their effects. A customer may come away more satisfied, one may make a better living, directions may be given more clearly. B.1.2. Pooling All three processes, genetic, cultural, and operant evolution, require a pool of variation that includes substitutable variants. In general, the pool generates a frequency distributiona profile of the frequencies of various typesthat may change with time. For talking about evolutionary change, the important relative frequencies are those of the substitutable variants. Change results from competition. Figure 1 illustrates the general idea. The top diagram represents a hypothetical pool, within which are substitutable variants A, B, C, and D, which occur at different frequencies. They could represent four different alleles for four different structures of an enzyme, or four different ways to catch termites (e.g., with fingers, with a leaf, with a stick, or with a leaf stem). The relative frequencies are shown in the middle graph (open bars; the shaded bars will be discussed below). Allele (variant) B occurs at the highest frequency, then C, then D, and the least frequent is allele A. This pattern of relative frequencies may remain stable with time or may change, depending on selection. -------------------------------------------------------------- insert Fig. 1 about here -------------------------------------------------------------- Whereas the middle panel of Figure 1 assumes discontinuous variation, the open bars in the bottom panel illustrate a hypothetical frequency distribution for variation fine enough to be considered continuous. It could represent variation in the genes affecting height or variation in squeezing clay that affects the thickness of the walls of pots. Although the variants cannot be grouped into discrete categories, they still exhibit a pattern of frequencies that may remain stable or change, depending on selection. Figure 1 illustrates the general idea of a pool characterized by a pattern of frequencies, which constitutes the essential element of variation in any evolutionary process. Genetic evolution, cultural evolution, and operant evolution (shaping) all assume such a pattern of variation, although they differ in details, such as whether the units are localized or extended and whether variation is continuous or discontinuous. Genes are usually thought of as particular locations on chromosomes (i.e., localized units) and alleles as differing in physical structure (i.e., varying discontinuously), but when enough genes act in concert and vary, the substitutable variation becomes (approximately) continuous. Under some circumstances, such as parthenogenesis, the unit of variation may even be the entire genome (Dawkins, 1989a). Then the substitutable variation is certain to seem continuous. Although Dawkins (1989a; 1989b) suggested a discrete unit of cultural variation analogous to the gene, the meme, nothing requires that the units of culture be localized or that variation in culture be discontinuous, any more than in genetic evolution. Boyd and Richerson (1985), for example, describe mathematical models of cultural evolution that assume variation to be continuous. In her classic book, Patterns of Culture, the anthropologist Ruth Benedict (1934) described the patterns of behavior in culture with the word custom. A custom or a practice cannot be localized to particular moments of time; it is an extended pattern of behavior that can only be observed over a substantial period. With operant behavior too, we are under no compulsion to assume discontinuous variation or localized units. That variation may be continuous is recognized in the study of response dimensions such as force, duration, and rate. The assumption that behavior must be defined in terms of momentary response units, however, has persisted for over a hundred years. Nineteenth-century connectionism, in the forms of associationism and reflexology, promoted a view of behavior as composed of localized units such as ideas, sensations, and responses. That view was an accident of history, however, and may be overcome. Baum and Rachlin (1969), for example, suggested that behavior be divided into periods filled with various activities. Favorite responses of the laboratory, such as the lever press and the key peck may be recast as activities, lever-pressing and key-pecking, which extend in time (Baum, 1976). Rachlin (1994) suggested that behavior generally be thought of as organized into patterns extended in time (Baum, 1995a, 1997). As with the customs of culture, an individuals daily behavior may be divided into activities like working, attending to family, and entertainment, none of which may be localized to moments in time. Frequency distributions like those in Figure 1 presuppose that one may characterize the variation in a gene pool or behavior pool by taking a sort of snapshot of the frequencies at a moment in time. This might seem necessary for analytical purposes, because the frequencies may be changing. In practice, however, the snapshot is an abstraction, just as instantaneous velocity in physics is an abstraction, because any real sample is extended in time. In a gene pool, birth and death constantly alter the picture. For a behavioral pool, temporal extension is unavoidable. The customs of a culture or the habits of an individual cannot occur at a moment in time. The problem of taking a snapshot of frequencies is solved by choosing a time period long enough to provide an adequate sample but short enough that the pool may be thought of as unchanging for that duration. Depending on rate of change, one might gather data over a period of weeks, months, or years. As long as change in the pattern of frequencies during a period of sampling is negligible in comparison with change between samples, the course of change in the pool may be studied. That population thinking is central to genetic evolution has long been recognized. Population thinking, however, is equally central to understanding evolution of cultural behavior and individual operant behavior (Glenn, Ellis, Greenspoon, 1992). B.1.3. Cultural practices and operant behavior The line between cultural practices and operant behavior patterns may be fine. Indeed, Skinner (1981) argued that cultural patterns are operant patterns. Since cultural practices presumably are maintained by their consequences, they might be considered operant patterns by definition. They may be distinguished, however, for the purpose of discussing cultural evolution by two characteristics. First, cultural practices are the possession of a group. To be called a cultural practice, a behavior pattern must occur in the members of a grouppossibly a subgroup within a larger group, but definitely in more than one individual. Second, cultural practices are transmitted from member to member in the group. Unlike individual operant patterns, which one may say are transmitted to the same individual at different times, cultural practices are transmitted from one individual to another and may occur in different individuals at the same time. B.2. Recurrence Recurrence means occurring again or coming up again. It is a general term for the tendency of a type of unit to reappear, with variation, time after time in the populationa more general term than replication, transmission, or retention (Campbell, 1965). B.2.1. The copying metaphor Genetic evolution is usually taken as the paradigmatic example of an evolutionary process. As an example, genetic evolution has both advantages and disadvantages. An advantage is that it has received enough attention to be both familiar and relatively well understood. A disadvantage is that, being comparatively well understood, some of its peculiarities are too easily mistaken for properties of evolutionary processes in general. This is particularly true of its mode of recurrence, which is often described with the metaphor of copying. Evolutionary recurrence need little resemble copying a page in a photocopier. The word replication may be a synonym for copying, but may also be equated to reconstruction, which, for DNA, would be closer to the mark. We know about the uncoiling of the strands and the assembling of amino acids into replicate strands, with some recombination and occasional errors. In meiosis, the entire genome is replicated and divided into haploid components at once. The entire haploid genome is passed as a whole to the next generation. We need to ask, however, which properties of genetic transmission are essential for evolution. Darwin knew nothing of what we know about genetics today. Yet he was the author of the theory of evolution. His ignorance of genetics in no way prevented him from seeing the role of recurrence. Darwin understood what was necessary: that the traits of parents tend to recur in offspring. More generally, the traits of one generation are passed on to the next generation. Even the words parent, offspring, and generation, impede generalization. The essential part is recurrence through time. Traits tend to breed true. In the gene pool of a population of mice, the genes that make for a dark coat tend to recur through time, with the result that dark coats tend to recur (and possibly lower predation rate). In the beavers gene pool, the genes that make for dam constructing tend to recur, and if substitutable variants exist, each variant tends to recur, although selection may favor one variant over others. True, the recurrence of genes is the result of the details of reproduction, and those details are essential to understanding many aspects of genetic evolution. For a general definition of evolutionary process, however, what counts is the tendency of types in a population to recur in time. Today we forgive Darwin for having believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, but writers about culture point out that such inheritance does occur in cultural evolution (e.g., Boyd Richerson, 1985). Again, however, the mechanism of recurrence is only important for understanding the details of cultural evolution. That it entails the inheritance of acquired characteristics helps us to understand the ways in which cultural evolution differs from genetic evolution. It is faster, for example, because transmission may occur between any individuals, not just parents and offspring, and may occur throughout the lifetime of an individual. It occurs as a result of imitation and instruction, although we might argue about exactly what those processes entail (Baum, 1994; 2000). The key, however, is that if a potter makes a certain kind of pot, his students will make the same kind of pot, and their students also, and so on. The practice recurs through time in the cultures pool of practices. Suppose, instead of genetic evolution, we took operant evolution (i.e., shaping) as the paradigmatic example of an evolutionary process. We would see immediately that copying or replication is just one means of recurrence. A pigeon in an experiment pecks at a key time after time. A person goes to work day after day. Too little is known about the nervous system to say what the mechanism is by which behavior recurs in the same organism from time to time. Luckily, we may proceed with studying behavior without having any idea how recurrence is accomplished. The situation resembles that in biology prior to the synthesis of genetics with evolution in the early part of the twentieth century. B.2.2. Imperfect recurrence Part of the reason for variation is that recurrence is often imperfect. Hull (1988) defines a replicator as an entity that passes on its structure largely intact in successive replications (p. 408). A paraphrase for the sake of generality might substitute recurrences for replications. Emphasis, however, should fall on the word largely. Accidents happen. In genetic evolution, reconstruction of DNA sometimes goes awry. In cultural evolution, imitation and instruction may be inexact. In operant evolution, too, variation is intrinsic to recurrence, because context never exactly repeats, reconstruction even of a stereotyped activity like key-pecking varies, and accidents happen. Recurrence need only have high fidelity; it need not be perfect. Indeed, one might argue that it must be imperfect, if the pool is to include sufficient variation to produce novelty. Without novel types, a pools response to selection must eventually cease. B.2.3. Recurrence in behavior In genetic and cultural evolution, the units (genes or practices) may outlive their possessors [their vehicles in Dawkinss (1989b) parlance; their interactors in Hulls (1988)]. Operant behavior, in contrast, must die with its possessorby definition, because if it lived on in others, it would be considered cultural. In no way, however, does this disqualify operant shaping as an evolutionary process. The key elements remain: a pool of variation, substitutable variants, and recurrence of variants through time. The frequency distributions in Figure 1 might describe genetic variation, cultural variation, or operant variation. Whether they remain stable or change with time depends on their relation to selection. B.3. Selection The key to selection is differential recurrence. If substitutable variant A1 tends, on the average and over time, to recur more frequently than A2, the relative frequency of A1 increases at the expense of the relative frequency of A2. This happens if the size of the pool of variants is fixed or increases more slowly than the variants rate of recurrence. Usually one assumes the pool size to be fixed, because the size of a population of mice, for example, is limited by the environments carrying capacitythat is, the resources available to support the population. A behavioral pool, of cultural variants or operant variants, is fixed by limits on time, because only so much behavior can occur in a 24-hour day. Consequently, when one substitutable variant increases in frequency, another must decrease. If one variant is more successful, it tends to replace the other. One substitutable variant succeeds over another by virtue of superior environmental effects. For genetic evolution, this is where longevity and fecundity come in. Genes endure if their vehicles (interactors) endure, and recur if their vehicles (interactors) reproduce. The specific reasons for enhanced recurrence may be extremely variedbetter defending or capturing of resources, better avoidance of predators, better defense against parasites, better mate selection, more mates, more offspring, better care of offspring, and so on. All of these superior environmental effects ultimately increase the recurrence of the alleles that produce them and thus decrease the recurrence of the less successful alleles. For cultural and operant evolution, the same sorts of environmental effects act on the pool, but less directly and, therefore, with some slippage. B.3.1. Selection in culture The consequences of cultural practices that may vary, making one variant more successful than another, may be thought of in terms of reinforcement and punishment. Practices are maintained proximally by social reinforcement and punishment (Baum, 1995b, 2000; Skinner, 1981). Our group shuns the eating of pork is backed up with punishment (e.g., disapproval, ostracism) for eating pork. This mode of adornment is correct is backed up with reinforcement (e.g., status, mating opportunities) for adorning oneself so. Ultimately, the maintaining and differentiating social reinforcement and punishment are cashed out in terms of reproductive success of the vehicles (interactors) that carry the genes producing susceptibility to social consequences (docility; Simon, 1990). If group membership is beneficial to reproductive success, then group cohesion and cooperation are beneficial, and practices that make for group cohesion and cooperation are selected as a result of the members docilitytheir susceptibility to social consequences. Indeed, Boyd and Richerson (1992) demonstrated theoretically that social punishment allows selection of cooperation and just about any other behavior salutary to the group. [This summary omits other adaptations, such as sensory specializations and imitation (Baum, 1994; 2000).] Dawkins (1989b) argued that the slippage between proximal social consequences and ultimate reproductive consequences allows cultural evolution to proceed independently of genetic evolution. The logic of genetic evolution goes against such a view. If some alleles make for more docility than others, the most successful alleles lie somewhere in the middle of the range of possible levels of docility, somewhere in between none and anything goes. Too much docility means too little certainty of reproduction, because too much docility allows the spread and maintenance of customs that reduce reproduction. Thus, ultimately, alleles producing too much docility are selected against. [Boyd and Richerson (1985) make a similar point in their discussion of the tension between imitation and individual learning.] One factor that curbs docility is primary reinforcement and punishment. As Dawkins (1989b; p. 57) suggests, consequences like sweet taste in the mouth, orgasm, mild temperature, smiling child or various sorts of pain, nausea, empty stomach, screaming child may have a genetic base because their presence generally affects the likelihood of successful reproduction. Such stimuli constitute proximate tokens of ultimate reproductive success or failure. If an interactor (vehicle) could be put together that would increase any behavior that produced the nice environmental effects (circumstances that enhance reproductive success) and avoided the nasty environmental effects (circumstances that depress reproductive success), such an interactor (vehicle) would prosper, and genes it carried would be more likely to recur in subsequent generations. As a result, genes that make for susceptibility to reinforcement by fitness-enhancing tokens are selected. As a result, neither individual behavior nor cultural customs will stray too far from patterns that maintain the frequency of those tokens. They will stray, however, for two reasons. First, the tokens bearing on reproductive success is far from certain. Sweet taste is a reinforcer, and some consumption causes no problems, but over-indulgence in sweets undermines health. Second, tokens may conflict with one another. The same behavior that produces a smiling child may also produce an empty stomach. Which should win out may be far from clear; only the calculus of long-term reproduction can tell. When short-term and long-term consequences conflict this way, dysfunctional behavior may arise. Whether it persists or not depends on whether patterns that enhance fitness in the long run, such as eating fruits and vegetables, replace the dysfunctional ones, such as eating junk food (Baum, 1994, 2000; Rachlin, 1995). Although a person may die before dysfunctional behavior is replaced, correction in culture lies under no such limitation. It may take a few generations. B.3.2. Primacy of reproductive success Maladaptive customs tend to drop out of the culture pool for two reasons. First, failure to correct results in natural selection. Those who over-indulge in sweets tend to become sick with diabetes and leave fewer offspring as a result (Diamond, 1992). Maladaptive customs decrease in frequency when their vehicles (interactors) leave fewer descendants to continue the customs. Groups that follow dangerous or abstinent practices, such as Quantrills Raiders or the Shakers, tend to disappear. Second, but probably more important, is that maladaptive customs contrast with their competitors (substitutable variants) in the calculus of reinforcement and punishmenti.e., in the tokens of fitness. Prohibition in the U. S. was a response to the ruinous effects of over-indulgence in alcohol; today educational campaigns encourage patterns of moderation or abstinence, based on better quality of life. When a maladaptive custom like smoking tobacco spreads through a culture because of short-term reinforcement, its long-term punishing effects eventually come into focus in the form of social contingencies that punish it more immediately (or reinforce alternatives like nicotine patches more immediately). The power of reinforcers and punishers as tokens of long-term reproductive success makes persistence of maladaptive customs unlikely. The genetic underpinnings of reinforcement and punishment argue against Dawkinss (1989a and b) conjecture that cultural evolution proceeds independently of genetic evolution. The genes that underlie learning and culture open the door, so to speak, to environmental influence, but they do not fling it wide. Selection in all three processesgenetic, cultural, and operant evolutionmay be traced back to reproductive success of genetic variants. In genetic evolution, the relation is direct; in cultural and operant evolution, the relation is less direct, but still strong. When genes that make behavior sensitive to its consequences are selected, that must mean that the advantages of behavioral flexibility outweigh the costs it imposes in terms of energy and risk of error. If not, competitor genes that allowed no flexibility would prevail. So, tokens of reproductive success attained the status of reinforcers, because variation in the environment rewarded flexibility in the means to them. Signs of health, resources, and social relationships became powerful reinforcers, because the interactors (vehicles) for which they were reinforcers reproduced more often. A parallel argument applies to punishers, such as nausea, pain, snakes, and frowns. The same mechanisms of reinforcement and punishment that select among substitutable variants in operant evolution select also in cultural evolution. The differences are that cultural evolution entails transmission from individual to individualimitation and instructionand therefore depends heavily on social stimuli for provenance and social reinforcement and punishment for selection. In all three of the processes we are discussing, a question arises about the extent of the vehicles or interactors. Hull (1988) defines an interactor as an entity that interacts as a cohesive whole with its environment in such a way that this interaction causes replication [i.e., recurrence] to be differential (p. 408; italics in the original; bracketed material added). But how large a unit can interact as a cohesive whole? Group selection is usually treated with skepticism among evolutionary biologists, because it should normally be too weak to have much effect on gene frequencies. To work, it would require that gene flow into the group be negligible. That might be true of colonies of eusocial insects, for example (Seeley, 1989), but it would be unlikely for most groups, because of immigration of new members into the group. In cultural evolution, it is more likely, because imitation and instruction maintain a high degree of conformity within the group, even if new members join (Richerson Boyd, 1992). In cultural group selection, groups with certain practices (e.g., a type of food cultivation) may out-compete other groups. The advantaged group may increase in frequency if it reproduces by fission and if competing groups tend to dissolve. In evolution of individual operant behavior, where the distinction between replicators and interactors disappears, the analog to group selection is the temporally extended contingency. Extended contingencies are often discussed in terms of delays of reinforcement. The more temporally extended the behavioral pattern, the more delayed the consequences. Alternatively, one may consider delay to be incidental and the crucial aspect of extended patterns to be their cohesiveness. Extended behavioral patterns, such as eating a good diet, are notoriously difficult to maintain. Rachlin (1995) argues that good extended patterns (often called self-control) have a greater payoff than short-term patterns (called impulsiveness or defections from the larger pattern). A defection from eating a good dieteating an ice cream sundaehas an immediate payoff, but a lower value than eating a good diet in the long run. Selection on extended patterns is weak for the same reason that group selection on genes is weak. The boundaries of the group or of the extended pattern tend to be permeableto immigration or to defectionthe greater the permeability, the weaker is selection. This may be overcome in operant evolution by introducing relatively short-term contingencies that maintain the extended pattern intact (e.g., reminders about ones diet). B.3.3. Why not phenotypic plasticity? To explain the variation of culture or behavior from one environment to another, the alternative to selection is phenotypic plasticity. Cosmides and Tooby (1992; Tooby Cosmides, 1992), for example, put forward the idea that the human brain contains a large number of modules, algorithms, or mechanisms that produce behavior depending on environmental conditions. They contend, If human thought falls into recurrent patterns from place to place and from time to time, this is because it is the expression of, and anchored in, universal psychological mechanisms (p. 216). They refer to such patterns as evoked culture. The conception has been compared to a jukebox containing recordings that can be played whenever called upon (Wilson, 1999). When food availability is highly variable, the social contract algorithm plays out food sharing; when food availability is stable, the jukebox plays keeping food within the family. Such explanations fail on two grounds. First, they are implausible. They exaggerate what is probably true, that genes constrain evolution of cultural practices and of individual behavior, to make a claim that would skip over the obvious effects of consequences on behavior. Instead of sensitivity to feedback, they substitute input-output rules; given a certain environmental input, the mechanism produces a certain output. Such a view fails to explain an obvious fact: that culture evolves even if the environment remains constant. Second, alternative explanations are more plausible. If human behavior falls into recurrent patterns, that may be because of convergent cultural or operant evolution. Similar contingencies select similar behavior. C. EVOLUTIONARY EXPLANATIONS OF BEHAVIOR Mayr (1961) distinguished between proximate and ultimate explanations of behavior. Alcock (1993) incorporated the distinction into a textbook on animal behavior. According to Alcock, proximate explanations explain how mechanisms within an animal operate, enabling the creature to behave in a certain way (p. 2; emphasis in the original). Ultimate explanations explain how those mechanisms evolved as a result of selection. Proximate explanations refer to physiology and development. Ultimate explanations refer to history and reproductive success. C.1. Genetic proximate and ultimate explanations Proximate explanations are about individual organisms, whereas ultimate explanations are about populations. The question, Why do beavers build dams? may be answered in two different ways. In one interpretation, the account would refer to stimuli from water and trees, the structure of the nervous system, hormones, and so on. It would explain how the cluster of genes that make for dam building express themselves in physiology and interact with the environment to ensure that Beaver X, alive today, builds a dam. That would be a proximate explanation. The ultimate explanation, in contrast, would make no reference to Beaver X, but would be about beavers as a species or about a population of beavers or about the gene pool of a population of beavers, to which Beaver X or its genes might belong. It would refer to the adaptive consequences of building dams, variation within populations long ago, and increase in the frequency of alleles promoting dam building. It would explain how those alleles became common in the gene pool. Proximate explanations are silent about where the mechanisms for dam building came from. Ultimate explanations are silent about Beaver X, except to say that Beaver X builds a dam because it is the nature of beavers to build dams, and then to explain where that nature came from. So to speak, ultimate explanations are about the forest, whereas proximate explanations are about the trees. Proximate explanations explain the behavior of individual organisms in terms of present mechanisms, whereas ultimate explanations explain patterns of frequency within a pool, such as those shown in Figure 1, in terms of a process of differential success. Proximate explanations refer to causes in the present, whereas ultimate explanations rely on processes that may be called historical, because they extend in time (Baum Heath, 1992). Evolutionary change results from continual operation of the process of selection over a period of time. That it takes time may be incidental, because it is a process of adjustment with a beginning in a disturbance (in the environment or in the population) and an end in a stabilized population. It is understood as a whole; at any point in-between, it is incomplete. Suppose the shaded bars in the middle panel of Figure 1 represent the relative rates of success (recurrence) from one time period (e.g., generation) to the next. Although variant A is lowest in frequency, it has the highest rate of recurrence. Given this pattern, we expect the frequency of variant A to increase, and the frequencies of B, C, and D to decrease. If relative recurrence is independent of frequency, the process will be incomplete until A dominates. (If relative recurrence is frequency dependent, a different equilibrium results, but that in no way affects this discussion.) Suppose the curve in the lower panel of Figure 1 shows relative recurrence for the continuous case. The situation is essentially the same; we expect the frequency distribution to shift to the right. Eventually, we expect its maximum to coincide with the maximum of the curve; then the distribution stabilizes, and selection acts to keep it stable. C.2. Cultural proximate and ultimate explanations Since every evolutionary process includes the distinction between the mechanism that produces the advantageous behavior and the history of advantage for that behavior, cultural evolution and operant evolution also admit of the distinction between proximate and ultimate explanations (Alessi, 1992). In cultural evolution, the mechanism by which a custom is transmitted explains why it persists (i.e., why it recurs), whereas the prevalence of the custom ultimately lies in a history of competition and selection. As with the question, Why do beavers build dams? the question, Why does this tribe adorn itself with tattoos? may be interpreted and answered in two different ways. In the proximate interpretation, the question might be reworded as, Why do the members of the Hells Angels motorcycle club wear the clubs tattoos? Alternatively, Why does Tom, who belongs to Hells Angels, wear the tattoos? Three or more mechanisms of transmission might be involved. Tom might imitate other members of the tribe. Other members might instruct Tom: If you want to be accepted, you should get the tattoos. Once Tom began getting tattoos, reinforcement from tribe members might lead to getting more tattoos. In the ultimate interpretation, the question might be reworded as, How did it come about that the Hells Angels wear those tattoos? The answer would refer to the history of selection in the culture pool. Tattooing may have competed with other forms of adornment, such as wearing black jackets, wearing hair in a ponytail, or speaking in a certain dialect. One or two members may have gotten tattoos. Other members who saw them frequently may have imitated them as a result. Boyd and Richerson (1985) call this frequency-dependent bias. The first members with tattoos may have been imitated by the other members or may have been able to instruct the other members because they held high status in the club. Boyd and Richerson (1985) call this tendency to imitate success indirect bias. Tattooing may have worked better to identify members because other groups might wear black jackets or ponytails and because dialects vary from region to region; tattoos are permanent and unambiguous. Boyd and Richerson (1985) would call reinforcement of a custom by such an environmental effect direct bias. Any combination of indirect bias, frequency-dependent bias, and direct bias would result in an increase in the frequency of wearing tattoos among the tribe, until the wearing of tattoos became virtually universal. C.3. Nesting of evolutionary processes Genetic evolution may be thought of as an overlay on cultural evolution. Ultimate and proximate genetic explanations may be constructed for the question, Why do the Hells Angels wear tattoos? They would be analogous to the explanations of dam building in beavers. The proximate rewording of the question would be, Why did Tom get himself tattooed? As with Beaver X, the explanation refers to stimuli (e.g., from the behavior of other members), reinforcers (e.g., from the other members), development (e.g., early exposure to Hells Angels), and physiology (e.g., brain mechanisms)all of which might be traced to gene expression. The genetic ultimate explanation rewords the question, How is the wearing of tattoos beneficial to the members of the tribe? The answer might be that it constitutes symbolic marking of the group, distinguishing it and promoting cohesion within it, which in turn promotes group selection for various forms of cooperation, which enhance the success of the group and thus boost the members reproductive success. It would include also the advantages to alleles that make for frequency-dependent bias, indirect bias, and direct bias in competition with alleles that do not (Boyd Richerson, 1985; Richerson Boyd, 2000). Other stories might be told, but they would all end with the same reference to reproductive success, because in a genetic ultimate explanation genes must be selected. The biasing effects of genes ensure that any custom that decreases reproductive success, even if common for a time, is likely to disappear eventually. C.4. The general evolutionary process Figure 2A diagrams an evolutionary process in general terms and shows the different focuses of proximate and ultimate explanations. Each of the variables, V, F, E, or R, may be thought of either as a set of variants, as a frequency distribution across variants, or as a frequency of a particular variant relative to all others. In the parlance of cybernetics, they are operands and transforms, whereas the rectangles represent processes (transformations) that produce transforms from operands (Ashby, 1956). A pool of variants (process) results in V, a distribution of substitutable variants or relative frequency of a particular variant relative to all its competitors. A process of expression transforms V into F, a distribution of interactors (or vehicles) or frequency of one type of interactor relative to all others. The expression process receives input from the environment, omitted from Figure 2 in the interest of simplicity. The input is represented by levels of variable N (N1 N6) in Figure 3, which illustrates the various transformations in Figure 2A. The top line of Figure 3 shows Vi composed of three variants, A, B, and C, having equal frequencies. The different levels of the environmental variable N affect the outcomes in Fi; so that B coupled with N2 goes to a , the same outcome as A coupled with N1, whereas B coupled with N3 goes to b , and C transforms to b , g , or d , depending on N. In this illustration, the variation in N results in a distribution Fi that has more variety than Vi. -------------------------------------------------------------- insert Fig. 2 about here -------------------------------------------------------------- A set of external standards or contingencies, which might be characterized as a set of if-then rules, transforms F into E, a distribution of external effects. These are shown in Figure 3 as levels of W, X, Y, and Z, just to emphasize that they are transforms of the elements of Fi: W goes with a , X with b , Y with g , and Z with d . They may be thought of as levels of successe.g., reinforcer rates or numbers of matings. E feeds back to a recurrence process, which results in Ri, a distribution of recurrence rates or a relative recurrence rate. Following the example in Figure 3, if the elements of E associated with A (W1 W4) have a collective weight of 10 (6 + 3 + 1), those associated with B have a collective weight of 6, and those associated with C have a collective weight of 8 (entirely due to the fortunate occurrence of N6, which resulted in transform d in Fi), then the frequencies in Ri reflect these collective success rates. The appearance of variant D, however, has nothing to do with these success rates, but rather represents some kind of accident: a mutation, copying error, or external force. Ri closes the loop by entering the pooling process to result in the new distribution of variants Vi+1. -------------------------------------------------------------- insert Fig. 3 about here -------------------------------------------------------------- If this system is disturbed by a change in the pool (e.g., mutation or immigration) or in the external standards (e.g., a change in climate), resulting in disequilibrium like that depicted in Figure 1, it will tend to move back toward equilibrium, because iterations of the feedback loop cause the composition of the pool to change until it comes into accord with the external standardsi.e., to an optimal fit. Figure 2A also illuminates the roles of proximate and ultimate explanations (braces). The links from the pool to the external standardsi.e., from V to Fconstitute the focus of proximate explanations. They pose the question, By what mechanisms does a distribution of variants result in a distribution of interactors? The links from the external standards to the pool constitute the focus of ultimate explanations. They pose the question, How does the distribution of external effects change the composition of the pool? That, of course, is a question about selection. The diagram omits any explicit indication of the iterative nature of evolutionary change; that must be taken for granted. The reason that both proximate and ultimate explanations are necessary for a full understanding is that the two explanations address different parts of a whole processmechanical connection and feedback, immediate causation and history. C.5. Genetic evolutionary process Figure 2B shows the general diagram applied to genetic evolution. The gene pool offers a distribution (V) of genotypes. Ontogeny or development transforms V into a distribution (F) of phenotypes. Environmental contingencies specify a distribution (E) of environmental effects, such as rates of obtaining resources, of predation, or of finding mates. Reproduction, which may be thought of as gene copying, depends on E. Sometimes it is thought of as simple transmission of genes from parents to offspring, but it may also be complex, because it may be the locus of other forms of selection besides natural selectione.g., sexual selection. Its outcome R, the distribution of copying rates (fitnesses), in turn changes or maintains the composition of the gene pool. Proximate explanations focus on processes of ontogeny and development. Ultimate explanations focus on the feedback, the way the environmental contingencies and reproduction achieve selection among genotypes. As an example, we may apply Figure 2B to the evolution of culturethat is, the transition from a non-cultural species to a cultural species as a result of genetic evolution (as opposed to cultural evolution, our second process). Ontogeny converted the distribution of genotypes V into a distribution of phenotypes (F) that varied in ability and propensity for culturethat is, in the mechanisms that cause a group of people to have a culture (group-level behavior transmitted from member to member). Elsewhere I have argued that three mechanisms would suffice: sensory specializations, imitation, and social reinforcers (Baum, 1994, 2000). Whether or not these are the answer, they suggest the sort of mechanisms that would constitute a proximate explanation for the development of culture in children and newcomers to a group. The distribution F might be called variations on culture. A highly variable environment made culture beneficial to the hominids that possessed even its rudiments (Boyd Richerson, 1985; Richerson Boyd, 2000). It would, for example, solve many problems related to the obtaining of resources and mates. Those variants favored in the distribution of environmental effects (E) would be more represented in distribution R, with the result that the genes underlying the mechanisms for culture would increase in the gene pool. That feedback would be the ultimate explanation for the existence of culture. C.6. Nesting cultural evolution within genetic evolution Figure 4 diagrams the relationship between genetic evolution and cultural evolution and the different focuses of their proximate and ultimate explanations. It shows two feedback loops, an outer loop symbolizing genetic evolution and an inner loop (enclosed in the box) symbolizing cultural evolution (cf. Burgos, 1997). The inner loop takes the place of ontogeny in Figure 2B or expression in Figure 2A. The culture pool may be thought of as all the customs present in the groupthe potential variants, resulting in a distribution V. One might be tempted to think of V as a distribution of memes. Our ignorance of the workings of the brain suggests that that temptation is best resisted (Baum, 2000). The mechanism of expression, labeled Modeling + Rule-Giving, embodies the vagaries of the social environment that transform V into a distribution F of actual cultural variants (customs). Models and rules are stimuli that may induce imitation and rule-following, behavior that may be reinforced or punished by group members (Baum, 2000). Alternatively, one could think of the culture pool as directly producing F. (As before, F could also represent the relative frequency of a particular custom.) The structure of the social environment, particularly social contingencies, results in a distribution E of social consequences. For example, food sharing might result in approval, whereas food hoarding might result in disapproval or aggression. From E, transmission results in a distribution R of recurrences that feeds back to change or maintain the composition of the culture pool. The means of transmission are imitation and instruction (Baum, 1994; 2000). They constitute the locus where Boyd and Richersons (1985) indirect and frequency-dependent biases operate. -------------------------------------------------------------- insert Fig. 4 about here -------------------------------------------------------------- Figure 4 depicts the way in which cultural evolution and genetic evolution may interact. The distribution F interacts as F in the external loop (genetic evolution) with environmental contingencies to produce distribution Ethat is, cultural practices may affect genetic evolution (Boyd Richerson, 1985). If, for example, group members who shared food were more likely to marry, then any genes that promoted tendency to share food would be selected. The braces in Figure 4 indicate the different focuses of proximate and ultimate explanations in genetic and cultural evolution. Genetic proximate explanation focuses on the mechanisms by which genetic variants (distribution V; shown as input to the cultural pooling process) affect cultural evolution. Cultural proximate explanation focuses on the mechanisms (possibly in the nervous system, but specifically related to behavior in groups) by which cultural variants (distribution F) are expressed. Modeling and exhortation, for example, might induce food sharing. Cultural ultimate explanation focuses on the iterative feedback from social consequences that shapes the culture pool over time. Once induced, for example, food sharing might be reinforced by approval, status, or reciprocation. Genetic ultimate explanation focuses on the feedback from environmental consequences of culture on the composition of the gene pool. It represents the feedback of culture on genes that prompts Boyd and Richerson (1985) to speak of gene-culture co-evolution. Failure to keep these four different types of explanation distinct is likely to result in confusion. For example, development (genetic proximate explanation) might account for the presence of imitation and instruction, which underlie cultural ultimate explanation of cultural change over time. Cosmides and Toobys (1992) idea that cultural variation can be explained by genetic expression probably arises from confusing these two types of explanation. C.7. Proximate and ultimate operant explanations In operant evolution (i.e., shaping), the distinction between proximate and ultimate explanations is the distinction between physiological mechanism and history of reinforcement. Advantageous behavior is defined by reinforcement and punishment. Explaining the occurrence of advantageous behavior may refer to events in the nervous system or to the history of advantage. As with the other two evolutionary processes, a question like, Why does Liz brush her teeth before she goes to bed? has two interpretations. The proximate interpretation focuses on the mechanism: On any particular night, what causes Lizs tooth-brushing? The proximate explanation would focus on stimuli that regularly precede going to bed and tooth-brushing and events in the nervous system that result from these stimuli and cause tooth-brushing at that time. The ultimate interpretation focuses on a history of selection: How did it come about that Liz brushes her teeth before bed? or What advantage has Liz derived for brushing her teeth? The ultimate explanation focuses on the differential consequences of tooth-brushing in Lizs life that selected tooth-brushing at bedtime over other behavior that might have occurred at bedtime. It would refer to bedtimes in Lizs childhood, her fathers exhortations, reprimands, and approval, and the later incorporation of tooth-brushing into the pattern of behavior surrounding bedtime combined with events at the dentists office. Different stories might be told, but they would all refer to the advantages of tooth-brushing over time. C.8. Nesting of operant evolution within cultural evolution Figure 5 parallels Figure 4, depicting the relationship between operant evolution and cultural evolution. The inner loop, operant evolution, contains the same elements as in Figure 2A. It stands in the place of Modeling + Rule-Giving in Figure 4 or Expression in Figure 2A. The behavior pool consists of all the individuals potential behaviorspecies-specific behavior plus all the behavior ever expressed in this individual. It results in a distribution V of behavioral variants. The culture pool adds to the individuals behavior pool via the distribution V. The mechanisms of stimulus control, including induction, transform V into a distribution (or relative frequency) F of presently occurring behavior. Those mechanisms correspond to what Staddon and Simmelhag (1971) called principles of variation. The structure of the environment, in the form of contingencies of reinforcement and punishment (or reinforcement and punishment feedback functions; Baum, 1973), converts F into a distribution E of environmental effects, or consequences. These reinforcers and punishers constitute the relatively immediate tokens of ultimate reproductive success discussed earlier. Distributed differentially over behavioral variants, they result via mechanisms in the body, particularly in the nervous system, labeled habit in Figure 5, in a distribution R of (relative) recurrences, which in turn changes or maintains the composition of the behavior pool. The behavioral proximate explanation focuses on the stimuli and physiological mechanisms that cause the behavior on particular occasions. The behavioral ultimate explanation refers to the selective effect that the token consequences have on the mechanism and behavior over time. A proximate explanation of sharing of the meat with other group members would point to the occasion of returning to ones village with a captured animal. The ultimate explanation would point to the history of exhortation in favor of sharing, social reinforcement for sharing, and punishment of hoarding. The effect of differential consequences on individuals behavior provides the means for the cultural effects that Boyd and Richerson (1985) call guided variation and direct bias. Guided variation names the contribution of individual innovation to the culture pool. For example, the individual who makes a better arrowhead may catch more food personally, but the method also may be incorporated into the culture pool by imitation and instruction. As we have already seen, direct bias is the effect of the token consequences on transmission of practices. The method of making the better arrowhead personally benefits anyone who uses it. The effect of behavioral evolution on cultural evolution is symbolized by the output of distribution F as F to cultural contingencies, which in turn produce E, the distribution of social consequences. -------------------------------------------------------------- insert Fig. 5 about here -------------------------------------------------------------- Taken together, Figures 4 and 5 suggest two levels of nesting. Evolution of individual operant behavior is nested within cultural evolution, which is nested within genetic evolution. To understand human behavior, one needs to attend to all three levels and to all the various proximate and ultimate explanations they imply. In a non-cultural species, the behavioral inner loop is directly nested within the genetic outer loop (cf. Burgos, 1997). In that situation, gene expression affects the mechanism that causes the behavior and is sensitive to feedback from the token consequences. As in cultural evolution, the token consequences affect gene copying, which feeds back on the composition of the gene pool, favoring alleles that promote the mechanism that allows operant evolution in the first place. If we ask why a laboratory rat presses a lever in an operant chamber, the answer might begin with an explanation of why the rat is so constructed that a contingency between presses and food pellets affects its behaviori.e., the advantages of learning by reinforcement (Baum, 1994; Donahoe, 1999; Zeiler, 1999). C.9. An example: Self-control Behavior analysts have progressed on the problem of understanding self-control. Initially, it was analyzed as a conflict between deferred and immediate consequences (Ainslie, 1974). Self-control consists of choosing behavior that pays off in the long run over impulsiveness, behavior that pays off in the short run. For an alcoholic, acceptance of a drink is immediately reinforced, whereas abstinence, though it has a greater reward, is reinforced only at a great delay. The question remains, however, as to how the deferred consequences ever overcome the influence of the relatively immediate ones. How does self-control ever predominate? Rachlin and Green (1972) suggested one possibility: commitment. If one acts at an early time to prevent choosing impulsiveness (e.g., having part of ones salary deposited directly to a savings account before one can spend it), then self-control becomes more likely when the choice arises. Most situations calling for self-control, however, offer no opportunity for commitment, because occasions for impulsiveness are frequent and unpredictable. Some alcoholics take drugs that produce noxious effects when alcohol is in the bloodstream, and some dieters have their jaws wired shut, but most people rely on other means. Rachlin (1995) argued that self-control might be better understood if it were seen as a pattern of choices extended over time. Occasional impulsiveness (defection from the overall pattern) might occur without necessarily disrupting the extended pattern of doing the right thing. The temporally extended pattern we call eating a healthy diet constitutes self-control even if it is peppered with minor defections like having an ice cream cone. The extended pattern, Rachlin argued, has a higher valuei.e., produces greater reinforcementthan any defection. Those greater and temporally extended consequences explain the persistence of the pattern. Rachlins (1995) account stops, however, at an awkward place. Although it helps to frame the initial question, it leaves the question unanswered: How does the pattern of self-control ever emerge and persist in the face of frequent opportunities for gaining immediate reinforcement for impulsiveness? In comparison with the contingencies favoring impulsivenesspowerful because of the relative immediacy of the reinforcementthe contingencies favoring self-control would be weak and vulnerable because of their temporal extendedness, as in our comparison to group selection. How could the weak selection ever prevail? That question raises at least two others: (a) Why would an individual care about eating a healthy diet in the first place? and (b) Why would such a concern spread and persist among many members of a society? On the surface, the answers might seem obvious: quality of life and longevity. Quality of life, however, is a social construct, requiring explanation itself, and death cannot punish nor can longevity reinforce any subsequent operant behavior. Instead, the two questions may be interpreted as being about cultural and genetic evolution: (a) Why do other members of a group promote and enforce eating a healthy diet? and (b) How are genes selected that support acquisition and maintenance of behavior like eating a healthy diet? The answer to the first question requires identifying self-interest on the part of one member in other members health. Such is near at hand, because practices concerning medicine and public health in advanced societies today are costly for the entire group (taxpayers, at least). The contingencies involved may be compared to those involved in so-called altruism. We sacrifice to benefit others if greater benefit accrues to us eventually. The sacrificial behavior is dangerous, however, because of the possibility of cheatingi.e., someones reaping benefits without paying the cost. When most members contribute to the cost of maintaining health in all, poor health is analogous to cheating. Customs promoting and enforcing health-enhancing behavior are selected in such a social setting (see social contingencies in Figures 4 and 5). A possible way that genes might be selected that support eating a healthy diet would be in response to variability in foods available from one environment to another. The advantages to imitation and easy instruction discussed earlier would apply to dietary habits. If you are an immigrant or child newly arrived in a group, the diet eaten by those around you is more likely to promote health than one you choose for yourself. Genes favoring imitation and easy instruction would be selected. These suggested explanations are incomplete and may be incorrect, but they illustrate the sort of ultimate operant, cultural, and genetic explanations that an understanding of self-control requires. Many of the ideas are open to empirical study. They point to directions in research on behavior within an evolutionary framework. D. CONCLUSION Viewed from a sufficiently general perspective, such as diagrammed in Figure 2A, genetic, cultural, and operant evolution may all be seen as examples of the same sort of evolutionary process. Since all three allow the distinction between immediate causation of behavior and the historical origin of the causes, all three allow both proximate and ultimate explanations. Indeed, full understanding requires both proximate and ultimate explanations. 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